LenioBio and Twist Bioscience Enter into a Collaboration to Further Enable AI drug-discovery

LenioBio GmbH, a TechBio company commercializing its ALiCE® cell-free protein expression platform, today announced a collaborative agreement with Twist Bioscience Corporation. The collaboration will integrate our ALiCE® platform with Twist’s DNA manufacturing and automation capabilities to accelerate the design–build–test cycle for protein expression services—delivering experimental results back to customers’ and partners’ AI models faster.

“AI can design new protein molecules for biologic drugs: the problem is that reality doesn’t always reflect what the computer imagines,” said André Goerke, CEO of LenioBio. “Bringing together Twist’s highly automated manufacturing and characterization capabilities with LenioBio’s ALiCE® system for cell-free protein expression, can enable rapid data generation from real-world molecules. The resulting data can then be fed back into the AI model as a tight lab-in-the-loop iteration—so design decisions are driven by fresh experimental evidence, without waiting weeks for expression bottlenecks.”

Why this matters: In AI-driven protein and antibody design, advantage comes from iteration speed and the quality of biology-native data. This collaboration will help teams run faster, higher-throughput lab-in-the-loop cycles with rapid, eukaryotic cell-free expression.

The ALiCE® platform enables production of full-length, folded, functional proteins within 24 hours—compressing timelines versus traditional cell-based systems and reducing the latency between computational design and wet-lab validation. Compared to other cell-free systems, ALiCE® supports complex molecules with eukaryotic characteristics that are difficult to produce in alternative platforms. By implementing ALiCE®, Twist will expand and complement its existing protein expression capabilities.

“AI-led antibody development is one of the most exciting growth areas in biologics where speed of iteration and quality of experimental readouts directly shape model performance and decision-making,” said Emily M. Leproust, CEO and co-founder of Twist Bioscience. “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.”

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