INDUSTRIAL IMPACT, MEDICAL
Twist Bioscience | March 10, 2023
On March 9, 2023, Twist Bioscience Corporation, a leading firm providing high-quality synthetic DNA through its silicon platform, announced the launch of integrated antibody discovery services. This premium offering combines the company's synthetic libraries and AI machine learning with an in vivo immunization approach acquired through its acquisition of Abveris, also known as Twist Boston. This service provides customers with optimized, development-ready antibody candidates.
The combined team, now called Twist Biopharma Solutions, is led by Tracey Mullen, MBA, the senior vice president of biopharma for Twist Bioscience. This newly formed entity leverages years of industry expertise, scientific excellence, and proprietary technology to discover the best antibody candidate for therapeutic targets of interest.
Twist Biopharma Solutions offers an end-to-end workflow for centralized antibody discovery and optimization, including target validation, hit generation, lead selection, lead optimization, and lead characterization. Twist, supported by high-throughput DNA synthesis and IgG antibody production, constructs extensive and particular synthetic antibody libraries with discovery starting with either in vivo or in vitro diversity.
The newly integrated in vivo discovery approach from Abveris of single B cell screening and hybridoma discovery enables parallel paths where multiple technology methods can be leveraged to build a panel of highly diverse antibody leads with broad epitope coverage. In addition, this multi-pronged approach can increase the likelihood of discovering highly specific, high-affinity functional antibodies by sampling synthetic and natural diversity.
The South San Francisco and Boston biopharma teams were combined to create Twist Biopharma Solutions, led by Tracey Mullen. Aaron Sato, Ph.D., remains integrally involved in Twist Biopharma Solutions and, as a chief scientific officer of Twist Bioscience, extends his expertise across the organization. Tracey Mullen joined Twist Bioscience in November 2021 through the acquisition of Abveris. In April 2022, she took on the position of senior vice president of operations, driving the completion of the Factory of the Future in Wilsonville, Oregon, which began shipping products in January 2023. Before joining Twist, she served as CEO of Abveris and worked on the antibody discovery team at Biogen.
About Twist Bioscience
Twist Bioscience is a leading biotechnology company specializing in synthetic biology and genomics. It has developed a proprietary DNA synthesis platform that enables the production of custom-designed DNA strands faster, more accurately, and at a lower cost than traditional methods. In addition, Twist collaborates with partners across industries to develop customized DNA sequences for specific applications and offers a range of other products and services, such as oligonucleotides, synthetic genes, and custom panels for next-generation sequencing. The company has also developed a library of over 100 billion synthetic antibodies, which can be used for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.
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MEDICAL, DIAGNOSTICS
Premier Research | March 14, 2023
Premier Research has partnered with InSilicoTrials, a leader in using artificial intelligence (AI) and computational modeling and simulation (CM&S) to speed up the development of new therapies and medical devices. Premier Research helps biotech and device companies take their ideas from the idea stage to the commercialization stage. The aim of the partnership is to make it easier, faster, and safer for treatments for rare diseases to get approval from the government.
CM&S and AI have made it possible to use virtual patients in clinical trials in whole or in part, which the FDA approves of in some cases. In silico trials make it possible to create fake control or treatment arms, help figure out how to sign up patients, and predict the safety and effectiveness of new drugs and medical devices more accurately.
The use of synthetic control arms generated using in silico CM&S techniques represents a powerful tool for enabling non-feasible rare disease research, both preclinical and clinical research. In the last five years, Premier Research has been in charge of more than 240 rare disease studies for a wide range of indications. This shows that the company is committed to orphan drug development for a long time. Premier Research is continuing to put money into trials for rare diseases by partnering with InSilicoTrials.
One major advantage of in silico simulation is the ability to investigate 'what if' scenarios, particularly in rare diseases where a larger patient population does not exist. By using biological, molecular, or genetic data to describe rare diseases, in silico models can make synthetic control arms. This, along with Premier Research's expertise in clinical and preclinical development, execution, and regulatory aspects of small population trials, can shorten the time it takes to make effective treatments for rare diseases.
The partnership between Premier Research and InSilicoTrials will focus on smarter in silico study design, leading to a more effective pre-clinical review of trial design parameters and faster submission-ready studies. CEO of InSilicoTrials Luca Emili says that combining modeling and simulation with AI is the best way to improve the R&D process in drug development. This is because it allows sponsors to speed up the development of new treatments, make medical products safer, and lower R&D costs.
About Premier Research
Premier Research is a global company that does clinical research, product development, and consulting. It focuses on using new technologies to design and run smart studies and trials. With more than 2,500 employees in 75 countries, it has a lot of experience in certain therapeutic areas and uses. The company is committed to empowering its customers to meet the unmet needs of patients and offers great benefits and flexible working conditions.
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MEDTECH, INDUSTRIAL IMPACT
Prnewswire | April 06, 2023
ConcertAI, LLC a leader in AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology and Real-world Evidence solutions for life sciences and healthcare, announced the release of its next generation of Clinical Trial Optimization (CTO 2.0).
"Trial sponsors have a range of new imperatives they're trying to meet: assuring that the trial population is reflective of the ultimate population that would have access to the drug; to set and meet diversity goals for those ethnic, racial and economic groups that are uniquely, negatively impacted by a disease; and meeting ever higher productivity imperatives for identifying and activating sites faster and working with those sites most likely to accrue to the pre-activation feasibilities," said Jeff Elton, Ph.D. CEO of ConcertAI. "Meeting these goals requires working with sites and investigators not historically preferred, designing trials for a minimum of burden on research sites and patients and, perhaps most importantly, moving more studies into community-based research settings."
CTO 2.0 now includes a range of features: (1) clinical depth and tools, such as line of therapy assessments, Kaplan-Meier survival curves, and cox-proportional hazard assessments that guide alternative designs with the largest underlying research dataset for oncology; (2) data integrating electronic medical-derived, medical claims, and social determinants of health; (3) site- and investigator-level information on current and previous clinical trials derived from public and private sources; and (4) operational trial metrics and site profile information to highlight performance and capabilities.
The solution's foundation is a study digitization layer that can handle any depth of inclusion and exclusion (I/E) criteria. Protocols can be assessed relative to standard-of-care in different settings and in different time periods, all the way down to the individual event or clinical activity level. There are APIs for integrating past study protocols from any legacy systems of records. Optimizer and recommendations engines can provide study-level optimizations and semi-automate site selection. Additional APIs can integrate past site survey data and investigator databases as a means of simplifying and unifying what are often non-integrated solutions within the clinical analytics and clinical operations organization. The SaaS technology will support researchers and clinicians in selecting the most appropriate sites for clinical trials, balancing potential patients available and previous trial performances at those sites to give the highest likelihood of success for a clinical trial. In assurance that trials can be conducted across settings and utilize the latest digital trial solutions that support direct EMR to EDC, CTO 2.0 leverages the latest clinical informatics integrations and data standards to ensure research can be conducted at scale and meeting, or exceeding, enhanced standards of care.
"In the past, clinicians used previously published protocols and recently approved studies in the same disease to inform trial designs for new studies," said Ronan Brown, ConcertAI's Chief Operating Officer. "Now that is changing. We'll now see greater reliance on large scale, multi-sourced, clinical datasets that have low latency, reflecting the latest treatments, supporting new designs, lower site burden, greater, diversity, and expanded views of relevant sites. It's a significant step forward in clinical trial planning and operations."
About ConcertAI
ConcertAI is a leader in Real-World Evidence (RWE) and AI technology solutions for life sciences and healthcare. Our mission is to accelerate insights and outcomes for patients through leading real-world data, AI technologies, and scientific expertise in partnership with the leading biomedical innovators, healthcare providers, and medical societies.
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