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Twist Bioscience Partners with Vanderbilt University Medical Center to Supply Critical Products and Identify Antibody Therapeutics for COVID-19
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of
About this update from Twist Bioscience Corporation
[{"type":"text","content":" SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nTwist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), a company enabling customers to succeed through its offering of high-quality synthetic DNA using its silicon platform, today announced a collaboration with Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) to supply synthetic genes and antibodies for the development of therapies for COVID-19. In addition, Twist Biopharma, a division of Twist Bioscience, will provide custom antibody drug discovery libraries and will screen the libraries for potential antibody therapeutics that would treat patients with COVID-19.\n\n\n“We are moving very quickly to employ our knowledge of infectious disease and robust computational biology platform to identify new therapeutics for COVID-19,” said Robert Carnahan, Ph.D., associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at VUMC. “Twist is the only synthetic DNA provider who can deliver the quantity and quality of DNA we need for our projects rapidly. We are working with them not only as a vendor for synthetic genes and antibodies, but have expanded our relationship to leverage the Biopharma capabilities, which we believe complement our antibody discovery efforts.”\n\n\nVUMC has been working with Twist Bioscience since 2018 when VUMC received a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3). The P3 program focuses on preparing for pandemics and specifically reducing the time required to develop protective antibodies from lab to field. The objective of the program is to go from outbreak to a clinic-ready therapeutic in 60 days, versus the standard timeline of one to two years. VUMC is now leveraging the learning from the P3 program to pursue therapeutic antibodies to treat COVID-19.\n\n\nVUMC’s approach to identifying potential antibody therapeutics is unique. Antibody-producing B cells are isolated from patients who have recovered from a viral infection, in this case COVID-19. The next step is to screen through all of the antibodies using proprietary bioinformatics and select thousands of antibody sequences that have the potential to effectively treat the disease. Twist then “writes” these synthetic DNA sequences base by base. The sequences are subsequently put into a recombinant antibody workflow to produce material for screening and selection in...