LenioBio and Twist Bioscience are uniting to speed protein expression services’ design-build-test cycle, giving faster results to customers’ AI models. Their collaborative agreement integrates LenioBio’s cell-free protein expression platform, ALiCE, with Twist’s DNA manufacturing and automation capabilities. The two companies aim to quicken experimental results from AI models for customers and other partners.

LenioBio and Twist Joining Forces

The implementation of ALiCE, LenioBio said in a press release, intends to expand and complement Twist’s existing protein expression capabilities. ALiCE enables production of full-length, folded, and functional proteins within a 24-hour period. This shrinks timelines versus traditional cell-based systems, also reducing latency between computational design and wet-lab validation.

Additionally, the platform can support complex molecules that have eukaryotic characterists—a difficulty to produce on alternative platforms.

Why AI Helps

LenioBio says among the advantages of AI-driven protein and antibody design are iteration speed and quality of biology-native data. The collaboration with Twist, accordingly, will help partner teams run faster and higher-throughput lab-in-the-loop cycles.

“AI can design new protein molecules for biologic drugs,” said LenioBio CEO André Goerke. “The problem is that reality doesn’t always reflect what the computer imagines. Bringing together Twist’s highly automated manufacturing and characterization capabilities with LenioBio’s ALiCE system … can enable rapid data generation. The resulting data can then be fed back into the AI model as a tight lab-in-the-loop iteration.”

This way, Goerke said, design decisions can be driven by fresh evidence, not after weeks of waiting on expression bottlenecks.

“AI-led antibody development is one of the most exciting growth areas in biologics,” said Twist Bioscience co-founder/CEO Emily Leproust. “Speed of iteration and quality of experimental readouts directly shape model performance and decision-making. To enable our customers working in AI-enabled drug discovery, we built out our characterization offering. And now, we’re continuing to expand it. Through this collaboration with LenioBio, we will be able to add cell-free protein expression to our offering.”