Twist Bioscience, Distributed Bio Partner

Distributed Bio and Twist Bioscience have announced a collaboration to offer therapeutic antibody design and optimization services, as well as an exclusive G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) targeting library, for Twist Bioscience customers. The custom software, to be developed by Distributed Bio exclusively for Twist Bioscience, will enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to easily use Twist Bioscience’s high-throughput long oligo synthesis technology to revolutionize how they design, engineer and optimize their antibody leads to identify high quality, fully-human antibody therapeutics while simultaneously receiving synthetic DNA to complete early drug discovery.

Additionally, the proprietary GPCR targeting antibody library will be available for customers to screen, in order to identify novel therapeutics against this valuable class of targets. “Distributed Bio is singularly qualified, through their depth and breadth of experience designing antibodies based on the natural human repertoire, to develop customized software for our customers,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience.

“With the quantity of genomic data expanding exponentially, there is a growing need to transition this knowledge into effective, patentable treatments for disease. By integrating antibody design and screening with the GPCR-targeting antibody library, our other specialized library offerings, and the ability to generate the synthetic DNA rapidly, we look forward to partnering with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to accelerate the research cycle, mitigate the downside risk of early discovery, and improve the patentability of antibody therapeutics.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Distributed Bio will develop and supply to Twist Bioscience a custom software solution for optimized antibody design that will integrate into Twist Bioscience’s eCommerce platform, available to customers in 2017. Financial terms were not disclosed. “In the last eight years, next generation sequencing has revolutionized our understanding of how the human body makes billions of well behaved antibodies. Distributed Bio has developed unique expertise in applying these lessons of nature to optimize the engineering of monoclonal antibody therapeutics, but often our computational principles have been limited by synthesis technologies,” said Jacob Glanville, co-founder and chief scientific officer of Distributed Bio.

“The reason we are so excited about the Twist Bioscience ultra high-throughput long-oligo synthesis is that it finally provides us a technology to build exactly what we need, and at the diversity and scale we want, to tackle these synthetic biology engineering challenges. This will disruptively expedite and enhance pharmaceutical development, while protecting against failure and downstream risk.”