Twist Bioscience Announces Robust Antibody Discovery Services Integrating In Vivo, In Vitro and In Silico Approaches

By Business Wire On Mar 10, 2023

A company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, announced an integrated offering of antibody discovery services available to customers. The offering combines Twist Biopharma’s synthetic libraries and AI machine learning with an in vivo immunization approach gained through the acquisition of Abveris, also known as Twist Boston. This premium service is able to provide customers with optimized, development-ready antibody candidates. The combined team will be led by Tracey Mullen, MBA, who was appointed senior vice president of biopharma for Twist Bioscience.

“By integrating our platforms into a robust service menu, we now offer premium throughput, resolution and speed to customers looking to outsource antibody discovery and optimization,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “When we acquired Abveris about a year ago, we knew bringing in vivo, in vitro and in silico platforms together within Twist would truly differentiate our capability to optimize and deliver development-ready antibody drug candidates for our customers, including different antibody formats (bispecific, antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), monoclonal, VHH, etc.) in multiple therapeutic areas.”

Dr. Leproust continued, “We have a rapid workflow, a track record of successfully identifying antibody leads against some of the hardest to drug biological targets and have discovered antibodies that are now in clinical trials. This makes Twist a strong partner for companies who desire a comprehensive and differentiated approach for both small projects and end-to-end workflows. We also routinely take on projects where others have failed to deliver antibodies.”

The newly combined entity, now known as Twist Biopharma Solutions, combines proprietary technology with years of industry expertise and scientific excellence to find the best antibody candidate for given therapeutic targets of interest. Supported by high-throughput DNA synthesis and IgG antibody production, Twist constructs large and highly specific synthetic antibody libraries with discovery beginning with either in vivo or in vitro diversity. These libraries are then screened to identify the best antibody candidates for a specific target. Additionally, the integration of the Abveris in vivo discovery approaches of single B cell screening and hybridoma discovery enable parallel paths where multiple technology methods can be leveraged to create a panel of highly diverse antibody leads with broad epitope coverage. This multi-pronged approach can increase the likelihood of discovering highly specific, high affinity functional antibodies by sampling both natural and synthetic diversity.

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Twist offers an end-to-end workflow for centralized antibody discovery and optimization. Services include:

Target validation (antigen development, tool antibody development)
Hit generation (hybridoma, single B cell, phage display, alternative in vivo models)
Lead selection (in vitro characterization, secondary and tertiary screening, functional screening, high throughput developability screening, epitope mapping, small and midsize purification)
Lead optimization (humanization, affinity maturation)
Lead characterization (functional profiling, advanced developability assessment)

Twist Biopharma Solutions, which includes the combined South San Francisco and Boston biopharma teams, will be led by Tracey Mullen in her newly appointed role as senior vice president of biopharma. Aaron Sato, Ph.D., remains integrally involved in Twist Biopharma Solutions and in his role as chief scientific officer of Twist Bioscience, extends his expertise across the organization.

“To set the stage for success and best leverage our core biopharma capabilities to drive revenue growth and acceleration, we will tap into Tracey’s commercial and operational expertise to take us forward,” said Dr. Leproust. “With the Factory of the Future coming along nicely, Tracey is ideally positioned to drive the customer funnel and focus on optimizing the biopharma team for revenue generation.”

Tracey joined Twist through the acquisition of Abveris in November 2021. In April 2022, she took on the position of senior vice president of operations, driving the completion of the Factory of the Future in Wilsonville, Oregon, which began shipping products in January 2023. Prior to Twist, she served as CEO of Abveris. Before Abveris, she served on the antibody discovery team at Biogen where she helped implement the technology transfer of the Adimab yeast display platform for antibody discovery and engineering. Throughout her tenure at Biogen, Tracey worked to optimize the in vitro discovery of antibodies to traditionally difficult therapeutic targets, including leveraging the Adimab platform to generate antibodies against GPCRs. Previously she worked for a contract research organization specializing in in vivo antibodies. She received her B.S. in chemical and biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Executive MBA from Quantic School of Business and Technology.

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