Twist Bioscience will provide antibody data for Lilly TuneLab, an artificial intelligence-based drug discovery platform created by Eli Lilly.
Under the agreement, announced Sept. 16, Twist will supply antibody characterization data services for TuneLab, including for AbLab, an antibody developability prediction model.
“The quality of an AI model’s output depends on the quality of the data used to train it,” Twist CEO and Cofounder Emily Leproust said in a statement. “Twist has the scale and high-throughput capabilities to generate consistent and reliable antibody characterization data these models need to be trained on.”
TuneLab gives customers access to AI drug discovery models trained on Lilly’s proprietary research data. Through the new agreement, TuneLab users will be able to order antibody services from Twist using TuneLab-preferred protocols to generate wet lab data.
In a statement, Twist said the arrangement also lets TuneLab users obtain preferred pricing while contributing the resulting data back to TuneLab for federated training. Other financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal is another positive indicator for Twist’s position in the AI-enabled drug discovery services and data market. Last month, the company’s shares spiked after Anthropic revealed it had used Twist’s wet lab services to verify its work on engineering proteins with AI. Earlier in August, Leproust told investors that she expects revenue related to AI-enabled drug discovery to approximately double from 2026 to 2027, to about $100 million.
Shares of Twist Bioscience are up 17 percent since Sept. 16 at $166.99 and are up 275 percent over the last six months.
