Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST) is proud to announce a collaboration with Astellas Pharma US, Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Naoki Okamura.), which will enable Astellas to leverage Twist’s high-quality synthetic DNA silicon platform for drug discovery and development. Through this agreement, Astellas has licensed a suite of Twist’s VHH antibody libraries, which will enable Astellas to create innovative and effective therapies for the benefit of patients.
Twist Bioscience is proud to announce the expansion of its collaboration with Astellas Pharma Inc. to three agreements across two of the company’s groups. This marks a major milestone in Twist’s ability to meet its customers’ needs, as the agreements cover both external antibody discovery services and internal discovery with Twist’s highly specific and potent antibody libraries.
Emily M. Leproust, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience, expressed her enthusiasm for the collaboration, saying “This latest collaboration with Astellas demonstrates how Twist can enable our customers to grow their pipelines.”
Astellas and Twist have entered into a five-year agreement, granting Astellas access to a suite of Twist’s VHH libraries. In exchange, Twist will receive an upfront payment, annual maintenance fees, and fees per product. Moreover, they will be eligible to receive additional payments associated with specific clinical and commercial milestones, as well as royalty payments on product sales.
Twist VHH Antibody Libraries
Twist’s revolutionary VHH libraries are revolutionizing the way we approach antibody development. Through a unique combination of synthetic and natural approaches, these libraries are able to generate up to 10 billion different VHH antibodies, each with three complementary determining regions (CDRs). This small size allows the VHH antibodies to access targets that traditional antibodies cannot, with tight binding affinity.
Furthermore, the modular nature of VHH antibodies facilitates the design of bi- or multi-specific antibodies that can be used to develop next generation therapies for a variety of therapeutic areas such as oncology, autoimmune disease, and virology. For example, Twist recently published a paper on the use of their VHH libraries to neutralize SARS-CoV-2.
About Twist Biopharma Solutions
Twist Biopharma Solutions harnesses the power of DNA synthesis technology, antibody engineering, and in vivo, in vitro, and in silico discovery methods to provide comprehensive antibody discovery solutions.
Our Library of Libraries provides partners with an unparalleled resource for antibody therapeutic discovery and optimization. Through sophisticated bioinformatics and software expertise, we are able to rapidly identify high affinity leads for our partners to pursue in the clinic.
Our automated screening and panning processes, combined with IgG conversion, expression, purification, biophysical characterization, and functional characterization, enable us to expedite the development of antibody therapeutics with minimal risk and a significantly lower failure rate.