Twist Bioscience and Distributed Bio Partner to Offer Antibody Design and Optimization Services

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 11, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Distributed Bio and Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis on silicon, today 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."

About Distributed Bio

Distributed Bio has built its success, and the success of its clients and partners, on a synergy between three powerful technologies. This includes a computational platform for analysis and engineering of antibodies, TCRs and peptides, a discovery platform of advanced antibody libraries to recover high affinity, drug-worthy antibodies against any target and an epitope focusing technology to elicit immune responses against specific surfaces. With seven of the 10 major pharmaceutical companies using our technology platforms and a proven track record of accelerating the early discovery of novel, druggable antibody targets that have the potential to become important therapeutics for many diverse diseases, we look forward to providing customized software to integrate with Twist Bioscience's DNA synthesis platform, offering customers an innovative, efficient and cost effective engineering platform. For more information, please visit www.distributedbio.com.

About Twist Bioscience

At Twist Bioscience, our expertise is accelerating science and innovation by leveraging the power of scale. We have developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a high throughput silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, including genes, oligonucleotide pools and variant libraries. By synthesizing DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates, our platform overcomes the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production, which in turn, expedites the design, build, test cycle to enable personalized medicines, pharmaceuticals, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production, diagnostics, biodetection and data storage. For more information, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.

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SOURCE Twist Bioscience

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