Twist Bioscience Expands Antibody Discovery Offering with Bispecific Licensing Agreement
Twist Bioscience Corporation a mid-cap growth and value biotech company, today announced that it has entered into a licensing agreement with Invenra Inc. (“Invenra”), a company that has developed platform technologies to discover therapeutic antibody candidates. Under the terms of the agreement, Twist will become the co-exclusive provider, together with Invenra, of Invenra’s B-Body® bispecific antibody platform (“B-Body platform”), extending Twist’s antibody discovery services.
Bispecific antibodies have emerged as one of the most promising therapeutic modalities, validated both clinically and commercially, with the ability to unlock new mechanisms of action. This is exemplified in that the development of this class of biological therapeutic is growing at an accelerated pace compared to more standard monospecific approaches,” said Emily M. Leproust, CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “Licensing the B-Body platform gives us direct access to a proven and scalable bispecific antibody platform that complements our current service offerings and further solidifies our position at the forefront of enabling next-generation biologics discovery for our customers, whether through traditional methods or AI-enabled.
The B-Body platform expands and complements Twist’s current antibody discovery services as well as giving customers the plug-and-play flexibility to utilize their own pre-existing monospecific antibodies in the B-Body platform. With a comprehensive offering spanning in vivo, in vitro and AI-enabled discovery methods combined with high throughput antibody expression and characterization capabilities, and now adding on a powerful bispecific technology, Twist meets customers’ needs whether they are utilizing Twist’s biologics discovery capabilities, using Twist as a wet lab partner or training a large language model (LLM).
The B-Body platform is designed to overcome multiple challenges commonly faced by bispecifics by enabling extremely favorable and predictable developability characteristics as well as at high concentrations with low viscosity needed for subcutaneous delivery,” said Roland Green, Ph.D., CEO and chairman of Invenra. “By licensing our B-Body technology to Twist, we leverage their expertise and infrastructure to enable broad access to the platform to support the rapidly growing demand for the development of next-generation bispecifics that address unmet medical needs for a breadth of diseases.
Twist will provide Invenra with an upfront payment of $5 million in cash and $15 million in Twist common stock. In a secondary transaction, Twist is taking an approximately 6% ownership position in Invenra through a preferred stock purchase from existing Invenra stockholders for $13.8 million in Twist common stock. Twist receives all revenue generated for bispecific antibody discovery services conducted by Twist as well as all license revenue, whether signed by Invenra or Twist. Twist will pay Invenra a 20% royalty on all license revenue.
Conference Call Information
The company plans to hold a conference call and live audio webcast for analysts and investors at 8:00 a.m. Eastern Time today. The conference call will be webcast live through the Investor Relations section under the “Company” tab at. Those parties interested in participating via telephone must register on the Company’s Investor Relations website or by clicking here. Upon registration, all telephone participants will receive the dial-in number along with a unique PIN number that can be used to access the call. To avoid delays, we encourage participants to dial into the conference call fifteen minutes ahead of the scheduled start time.
About Twist Bioscience Corporation
At Twist Bioscience, we work in service of customers who are changing the world for the better. In fields such as medicine, agriculture, industrial chemicals and defense, by using our synthetic DNA tools, our customers are developing ways to better lives and improve the sustainability of the planet. The faster our customers succeed, the better for all of us, and Twist Bioscience is uniquely positioned to help accelerate their efforts.
Our innovative silicon-based DNA Synthesis Platform provides precision at a scale that is otherwise unavailable to our customers. Our platform technologies overcome inefficiencies and enable cost-effective, rapid, precise, high-throughput synthesis, sequencing and therapeutics discovery, providing both the quality and quantity of the tools they need to most rapidly realize the opportunity ahead.
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