Ginkgo Bioworks Announces Partnership with Totient to Identify Neutralizing Antibodies Against COVID-19

Today, Ginkgo Bioworks announced a partnership with Totient, an AI-driven drug discovery company emerging from stealth, to rapidly identify neutralizing antibodies against COVID-19. Through this partnership, Totient will leverage Ginkgo's bioengineering platform to express and screen thousands of antibody candidates with the aim of identifying broadly neutralizing therapeutic antibodies against COVID-19 for further development. Totient leverages tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) to identify novel tissue-specific antigens and develop matching high-affinity antibody therapeutics. As the broader scientific community mobilizes to address the coronavirus pandemic, Totient has partnered with Ginkgo to adapt and scale its platform, which has been validated in oncology and autoimmunity, to aid in the effort to discover COVID-19 antibodies. Totient's population-scale antibody discovery platform reconstructs anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies from bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) samples.