Lilly TuneLab, Twist Bioscience Partner on Antibody Drug Discovery

Editor’s Take: Linking experimental data to AI-enabled discovery can potentially result in acceleration of antibody drug discovery.

Lilly TuneLab, an artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) drug discovery platform from Eli Lilly and Company, is partnering with Twist Bioscience. Twist is a mid-cap growth and value biotech company.

How Twist Interfaces with TuneLab

The agreement centers on Twist providing antibody characterization data services for TuneLab—including for AbLab, an antibody developability prediction model. In short, users can order antibody services from Twist using TuneLab preferred Twist protocols, to generate high-quality wet lab data.

TuneLab’s prediction models help participants more rapidly down-select candidate molecules. Overall, the approach links experimental data to AI-enabled discovery—allowing for potential acceleration of antibody drug discovery.

Twist Co-Founder and CEO Emily Leproust, PhD, says Twist’s scale and high-throughput capabilities generate consistent, reliable antibody characterization data. This caliber of data, Leproust explains, is what AI models should be trained on.

“The quality of an AI model’s output depends on the quality of the data used to train it,” Leproust said. “Lilly’s leadership in empowering AI-enabled drug discovery and its impressive network of partnerships create a powerful ecosystem … TuneLab users can select preferred protocols to generate high-quality data with preferred pricing. [This helps] them to more efficiently select antibody sequences against their targets and contribute that data back to TuneLab.”

Other Unique Lilly Services

TuneLab, part of Lilly’s Catalyze360 suite with Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, and Lilly ExploR&D, exists to accelerate biotech innovation. Participating companies can access AI/ML drug discovery models trained on decades of proprietary Lilly research data. Lilly Catalyze360 as a whole also supports biotech innovation by making available strategic capital, lab space and technology, and R&D.