Case Study: Vanderbilt University Medical Center achieves faster antibody discovery with Twist Bioscience

Vanderbilt University Medical Center speeds antibody discovery to 60 days with Twist Bioscience

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) was tasked by DARPA with dramatically accelerating the development of therapeutic antibodies against emerging viral threats, aiming to go from discovery to delivery in just 60 days instead of years. To meet this challenge, VUMC partnered with Twist Bioscience to leverage its high-throughput synthetic DNA genes, which were essential for scaling their recombinant antibody discovery process.

Using Twist Bioscience's scalable gene synthesis platform, VUMC researchers could rapidly obtain synthetic genes for thousands of antibody candidates identified through bioinformatics. This allowed the lab to produce material for screening in days, markedly speeding up the entire discovery and selection workflow. As a result, Twist Bioscience enabled VUMC to progress toward DARPA's 60-day pandemic response goal by providing the unprecedented speed and scale of DNA synthesis required for their accelerated pipeline.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center