Sosei Heptares Enters Antibody Discovery Agreement with Twist Bioscience to Discover & Develop Novel Therapeutic Antibodies Against GPCR Targets

Sosei Group Corporation and Twist Bioscience Corporation recently announced a strategic collaboration to discover therapeutic antibodies against G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) identified by Sosei Heptares.

The collaboration will utilize Sosei Heptares’ fully structurally enabled GPCR target proteins, isolated and stabilized using its proprietary StaR (stabilized receptor) platform technology.

Twist will leverage its proprietary antibody libraries, including two synthetic GPCR-focused antibody libraries, and apply its sophisticated bioinformatics approaches.

Sosei Heptares will have exclusive, full global rights to develop and commercialize any antibody leads identified and directed to the targets of interest. Twist will be eligible for an upfront payment, ongoing R&D costs and future payments based on the achievement of predefined development milestones. No financial terms are disclosed.

Miles Congreve, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer, Sosei Heptares, said “We are excited to partner with Twist Biopharma, a division of Twist Bioscience, to combine our world-leading GPCR-focused protein stabilization technologies with Twist’s extensive libraries, as well as innovative discovery and optimization technologies for therapeutic antibodies. GPCRs are implicated in a wide variety of diseases where antibody therapeutics are currently used. As a target class representing up to 30% of current drug targets, very few GPCR-targeting antibodies are approved drugs. This collaboration cements our ambition to enhance our ability to expand and exploit the potential opportunities generated by our GPCR platform, to create promising GPCR-targeting antibody therapeutics for a range of diseases.”

“We are pleased to partner with Sosei Heptares, a recognized leader in the stabilization of GPCR targets,” said Emily M. Leproust, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “We believe that by leveraging our target class specific GPCR antibody library along with our discovery and optimization capabilities, we will identify key antibody leads for further development by Sosei Heptares.”

We are an international biopharmaceutical group focused on the discovery and early development of new medicines originating from our proprietary GPCR-targeted StaR technology and structure-based drug design platform capabilities. We are advancing a broad and deep pipeline of novel medicines across multiple therapeutic areas, including neurology, immunology, gastroenterology and inflammatory diseases.

We have established partnerships with some of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies and multiple emerging technology companies, including AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Biohaven, Genentech (Roche), GSK, Neurocrine Biosciences, Novartis, Pfizer and Takeda. Sosei Heptares is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan with corporate and R&D facilities in Cambridge, UK.

“Sosei Heptares” is the corporate brand and trademark of Sosei Group Corporation, which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (ticker: 4565). Sosei, Heptares, the logo and StaR are trademarks of Sosei Group companies. For more information, please https://soseiheptares.com/.

By leveraging our unique ability to manufacture DNA at scale, we can construct proprietary antibody libraries precisely designed to match sequences that occur in the human body. This library of libraries gives our partners an integral and unbiased resource for antibody therapeutic discovery and optimization. This precise and rational approach to library fabrication combined with sophisticated bioinformatics and software expertise expedites antibody discovery by decreasing risk, increasing speed, and lowering the failure rate for antibody therapeutic development.

Twist Bioscience is a leading and rapidly growing synthetic biology and genomics company that has developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform to industrialize the engineering of biology. The core of the platform is a proprietary technology that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by “writing” DNA on a silicon chip. Twist is leveraging its unique technology to manufacture a broad range of synthetic DNA-based products, including synthetic genes, tools for next-generation sequencing (NGS) preparation, and antibody libraries for drug discovery and development. Twist is also pursuing longer-term opportunities in digital data storage in DNA and biologics drug discovery. Twist makes products for use across many industries including healthcare, industrial chemicals, agriculture and academic research.