Twist Bioscience (Nasdaq: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced that it will exercise its option to purchase all rights to a G-coupled protein receptor (GPCR) library and its proprietary Twist Antibody Optimization (TAO) software, both developed in collaboration with Distributed Bio.
“We began working with Distributed Bio in 2016, before the existence of our Twist Biopharma division, and have been using the GPCR library and antibody optimization software together with our silicon-based DNA synthesis platform successfully for the last two years,” said Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist. “Both proprietary tools integrate incredibly well with our ability to write synthetic DNA oligo pools at scale, creating precision antibody libraries, and optimizing antibody therapeutics. Neither of these tools would be possible without the use of Twist’s silicon DNA writing oligo pool technology.”
The GPCR library and the antibody optimization software were originally developed as part of a license and collaboration agreement between Twist Bioscience and Distributed Bio signed in 2016. In 2021, Twist exercised its option to purchase all rights to the Antibody Optimization Software and the GPCR-Targeting Antibody Library. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Building on the GPCR library, Twist Biopharma generated a wide range of precision antibody discovery libraries now encompassed in its “Library of Libraries.” The “Library of Libraries” contains an incredibly robust set of antibody libraries that use different antibody fragment scaffolds as well as different sources of fully human antibody sequences. Each library within the larger “Library of Libraries” contains more than 10 billion antibodies, providing robust and differentiated antibodies for antibody discovery. Once binding antibodies are identified from the Library of Libraries or other sources, Twist Biopharma utilizes the TAO software and its custom library capacity to further optimize leads for improved pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic, binding and other properties. Unlike other optimization platforms, TAO does not require that the initial input leads are derived from the Twist Biopharma libraries.
