I would now like to turn the conference over to Emily Leproust, Chief Executive Officer of Twist Bioscience. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody, and good afternoon if you are in Europe or Asia. It's my great pleasure to host you today for our Virtual Biopharma and Analyst and Investor event. As you know, biopharma is becoming an important part of Twist, and we thought it would be useful to you to hear from some of our customers about what they do with our platform and the benefit that it brings to their work and their companies. With that, we go to the next slide, and I will mention first that we will be making some forward-looking statement today. Next, I'd like to very quickly go over the agenda. I'll give you a brief welcome and Twist overview. We'll hear from the Chief Scientific Officer of the Twist Biopharma division, Dr. Aaron Sato, on the latest from Twist. Then we'll have a presentation from three companies.
First from Takeda with Dr. Robert Mabry, then from Invetx, we'll hear both from Dr. Jürgen Horn and Dr. Bill Brondyk. Then to close, we'll hear from Dr. Carsten Linnemann from Neogene. Then we'll have a Q&A session. You'll be able to ask a question either on the phone or I believe you can also type in your question in the platform, and we'll be able to answer both. We'll start with the live questions, and then we'll move on to the written questions. Before going forward, I want to really thank our four speakers. I know that it's an investment of their precious time. We really much appreciate their involvement into this event. At Twist, we write DNA from scratch, as you know. On the next slide, you'll see some of the ways our DNA is used.
Some customers use our DNA to engineer yeast, algae, and E. coli to produce chemical by fermentation instead of using oil. It's more sustainable, but it's also cheaper, and you can make materials that you could never make from oil. Our customers are using our DNA to improve food security. For instance, by using our DNA, you can engineer bacteria to deliver nitrogen at the root of plants instead of using fertilizer, which eliminates potentially a lot of fossil fuel usage. We'll hear today how our DNA can be used to develop therapies. As you know, our DNA is also used in diagnostic application for liquid biopsy, cancer diagnostics, or rare disease diagnostics. Last but not least, our DNA can be used to store data in DNA for the long term, which is potentially a great archival solution.
The basis for that on the next slide is our silicon platform in the middle. To contrast with, on the left, what our competition does, which is using the 96-well plate format to make 96 oligos, 96 piece of DNA at the same time. What we do at Twist in the middle is in the same format of a 96-well plate in a silicon chip, we can make one million oligos, so 10,000 times more oligos than the competition. We do that using the power of silicon to miniaturize the chemistry, which gives us advantage in throughput and cost. In addition, almost as important as the silicon, we've built a very sophisticated software infrastructure, to be able to produce all the products for all the customers at the same time on the same chip.
At the end, be able to split and send the right DNA to the right customers at the right time. That combination of silicon and software gives us massive scale that we are turning into commercial advantage. Next slide, please. Since we went commercial in 2016, we've been able to show some very fast revenue growth. Last year, we've achieved $54 million of revenue. In the first, three quarter of this year, in the June quarter, we've achieved even more than that, which is remarkable in the context of COVID. Our business model is such that as we raise our revenues, we're able to get better gross margins.
We've also, as a company, been quite focused on delivering improvement in gross margin at the same time as the revenue growth, which is enabled by our business model. Next, I want to very briefly describe the four businesses that we are building of our silicon platform. The first two are tools business in synthetic biology and next-generation sequencing. Those are somewhat analog business. As we go into more customers and sell more products, we see the great revenue growth that I've mentioned in the previous slide. There we have no reimbursement risk. We have no FDA approval. Those are transactional businesses. In addition, we have two embedded options for potentially big upside. One is in drug discovery. This is the focus of today. The second is in data storage. Next slide.
In the last nine months, again, talking all the way to June, the last quarter that we reported, we have made progress in each of those four areas. In synthetic biology, we have expanded our product line with DNA preps that enable us to serve more of our pharma customer needs. In next-generation sequencing, we've developed products that are useful for the COVID-19 crisis that we are dealing with, and more broadly with infectious diseases, with synthetic controls and NGS panels. In drug discovery, you'll hear today some of the work that we've done on developing our own antibodies against COVID-19, you'll hear from three of our customers on the external validation that our platform has had. Finally, in data storage, as you probably know, we've received some non-dilutive funding from IARPA. Next I'll talk very briefly.
I have three slides to introduce our Biopharma platform. What we have is through the platform, we offered first on the top left, a library of libraries. Aaron Sato will describe it, but it's basically, we have content that is available to our customers. Next, we can discover and optimize antibodies against target. Now we've shown that we're actually quite good at hard drug targets. Of course, we can do the easy drug target as well. We are able to do hard drug targets. Sorry, if you can go back. Thank you. Because in our Biopharma division, we've built high throughput production of IgG. Now we're able to move that IgG production away from the Biopharma division into the SynBio production, such that all our customers can benefit from the high throughput IgG platform that we've built.
Last but not least, now that we have had some external success, we have a few targets that we are pursuing as a Twist-sponsored program through internal lead discovery programs. The intent would be to, after we've done the discovery, some of the initial work, license out those antibodies with a higher share of the economic value. Next slide. We are very thankful that a number of customers and partners have now signed Twist. As you see, we're able to achieve partnerships where we can participate in the upsides through milestones or royalties. We are not a CROs. CROs typically do not get milestones or royalties. We believe we can offer something that is of higher value through hard drug targets, through speed, through universal platform that enables us to participate in some of the upside.
Then last, people sometimes ask, what is the unique differential capabilities that Twist brings? Why is Twist also good in discovering antibodies? There are three factors to that. The first one is that we have an unlimited DNA buffet that Aaron can access. So we have more molecules than others, so we can take more shots on goal. Second, each of those mutants are never randomly made, but are explicitly made, meaning that we can use the human repertoire, the knowledge of the human repertoire, to choose variant that follows that human repertoire. All our pharma molecules are fully human and human-derived. Which means that they will behave better in vivo. Then last, because we not only have the great science of Aaron's Biopharma team, but we also have engineering knowledge and experience at Twist.
We have automated and miniaturized most of the processes from library production, screening, reformatting of the IgG, as well as affinity and functional testing. Those three advantages we believe are unique. Basically, at the end of the day, we are more productive because we can take more shots on goals in a way that's automated. That higher productivity will enable our partners to do things that hopefully they could not get from other teams. That is the unique difference of Twist. With that, I'll pass the microphone to Dr. Aaron Sato, who is our Chief Scientific Officer, and he will tell you the latest on Twist Biopharma. Aaron?
Thanks, Emily. Today I'll give you an overview of the Twist Biopharma vertical at Twist Bioscience, and then also use our work that we've done on SARS-CoV-2 as a case study to really show you the power of our platform. Next slide. Again, I always say the best companies and teams and groups out there really understand the one thing that they really bring to the table. As Emily went through, for Twist, that's really our Silicon Platform that's the flagship of our company and really enables us to do all kinds of fantastic things. For Twist Biopharma, it's really taking advantage of our library capabilities. Basically, using the Silicon Platform, we can make just explicit sequences of oligos in pools, and we can then use those pools of oligos, again, upwards of even one million oligos, to build fantastic DNA libraries.
We use those libraries in Twist Biopharma to build our own proprietary antibody phage display libraries that I'll talk about later as our library of libraries. Utilizing Oligo Pools in this way gives us a lot of tight control over what goes into the library. I always say scientists are some of the most creative people that I know, and this technology that we have really enables them to use that creativity to make the next generation of antibody libraries for discovery of novel biologics. Shown here are just all these great advantages of using Oligo Pools to build libraries. Next slide. Again, how do we do that? You basically, again, synthesize explicit sequences of, in this case, CDR sequences in pools.
For a particular antibody domain, say heavy chain or light chain domain, we can basically make exact sequences of CDR loops that are actually seen in nature. Rather than making a random oligo, as Emily mentioned before, we can actually make exact sequences of human CDRs, or even as you will hear later, even CDRs derived from animals. We can put those into a library by shuffling them together in the context of a single germline domain. This allows us to, even though we are making a synthetic library, to make it in a very natural way, because we are using fully germline scaffolds, fully germline antibodies, and also using fully human, or maybe as we will see later, camelid-derived sequences in our libraries as well.
As we do that, I also say we also can take away things that might lead to deleterious effects, so we can remove sequences that might lead to developability risk. If we choose to, we also can even insert motifs into our CDR sequences, and that's actually key and central to a lot of our difficult to drug target libraries I'll talk about later. Next slide. Twist Biopharma, we really sit on the front ends of the discovery and optimization workflow for the biotech and pharma industry. We really want to help others, really help them first of all discover antibodies using our library of libraries that I'll talk about in a second.
Once biotech and pharma companies have their initial leads, either derived from our libraries or maybe even from other platforms, we have our TAO platform, which stands for Twist Antibody Optimization, where we can basically use this library platform I just talked about, coupled with some fantastic software that we've developed to optimize antibodies and do it in a very natural way. Next slide. In terms of that discovery effort, we've created now a whole suite of libraries in our Library of Libraries offering. They range from a fully human fab library that we call the Hyperimmune Library. We've also created a whole suite of single domain VHH libraries. Again, these are derived from camelids, and so they are very small and can be used for bispecifics, and are actually, as you'll see later, really helpful in combating infectious diseases.
We have a library that's derived from all the antibodies that have ever been crystallized, which is our structural antibody library. Finally, we have a whole suite of libraries against difficult drug targets from GPCRs, ion channels, and carbohydrates. As I mentioned before, this is really enabled by the use of the oligo pool platform we have at Twist to make these fantastic libraries. Next slide. How do we do that? Again, all of our libraries are in phage display. We can pan and screen using those libraries against any target we wish, whether it's a recombinant protein to a cell, to peptides. We rapidly do those through those pannings and screenings.
We then sequence all of our clonal outputs from our pannings. As Emily mentioned, we have this all you can eat DNA buffet, which is fantastic, that allows us to make lots and lots of antibody sequences. We can express and purify them and then do all the downstream testing. Next slide. Now I'll jump into the SARS-CoV-2 case study, which again, will really help exemplify the power of this platform. Again, we took several of our libraries from the library of libraries. We panned and screened them against both SARS-CoV-2 S1 antigen, which again, is very important for the infection of the virus, as well as the human ACE2 receptor, which is the co-receptor for the virus. Each of our libraries, as I showed, has really over 10 million different antibodies.
We did multiple rounds of panning using these libraries and then did a whole host of screening. At the end of the day, we made a whole panel of antibodies to do all the downstream binding and functional assessment, which included affinity, receptor competition, as well as some developability assessment. Next slide. How do we begin? How are we combating the virus? Really, we took a two-prong approach. Of course, like a lot of others, we tried to find antibodies to the spike protein on the virus to prevent infection. We also thought that protecting the natural receptor for the virus, in this case ACE2, would also be a potential therapeutic strategy. As you'll see later, we have a lot of data validating our S1 antibodies and the ACE2 antibodies are also proving to be very promising as potential therapeutics. Next slide.
Again, we did that whole panning and screening I talked about before. It came up with a whole suite of antibodies, both against S1 as well as ACE2, that were single-digit nanomolar to even picomolar antibody binders to both those different targets. We moved them ahead for further functional screening, as I'll show in the next couple slides. On the IgG antibody front, we did a project in collaboration with Vanderbilt and Dr. Crowe's lab, where we generated a library sequences derived from a COVID-19 survivor. We panned and screened those libraries against the SARS-CoV-2 S1 antigen, as I said, and we actually came up with a whole series of antibodies derived from that library that bound with double-digit nanomolar affinities to both the S1 protein as well as the S protein trimer.
Shown at the bottom, you can actually see that these antibodies also block and neutralize very well in pseudovirus assays. Finally, we did a study with Dr. James Brien at Saint Louis University, and he did a live virus FRNT assay and showed that they actually made these antibodies also neutralize the virus very potently against live virus. Next slide. The really very potent antibodies that we discovered against SARS-CoV-2 actually were derived from our VHH libraries. Here we show that, again, using the workflow I talked about before, we discovered several single domains against the SARS-CoV-2 S1 antigen, and then did the same analysis I just showed for the IgGs that we did similar to work we did with the Vanderbilt group.
What we see is that in live virus testing for these antibodies, you can see all the ones in yellow are the VHH antibodies. You can see very potent neutralization with these antibodies compared to the IgGs, which are shown in green on the left in the table. You can see that our VHH single domains are actually giving IC50 values in this live virus FRNT on the order of less than 0.1 micrograms per mil, which again, I'm told is a very good range for neutralization of the virus. Next slide. Just to kind of summarize the work that we've done on SARS-CoV-2, we've developed and discovered antibodies to both IgG antibodies as well as VHH antibodies that bind very tightly to the virus, as well as neutralize.
As I mentioned, we're also pursuing the ACE2 target as well and pursuing leads there that we'll very soon have some data around as well, where we're characterizing these leads, and they're all again derived from our synthetic antibody phage display libraries. Finally, I've shown that we have very potent both pseudovirus as well as live virus data. Just to summarize again, the future plans that we have for the antibodies. Again, we're planning to push them into in vivo studies to show not only the in vitro activity but also the in vivo activity of these antibodies. We're also trying to see whether we can create homo trimeric and hetero trimeric versions to really take advantage of the avidity effects by combining these VHHs into different combinations.
Finally, we're trying to scale up these antibodies further to do additional assessments in vivo, not only for efficacy, but potentially for PK and toxicity down the road. Next slide. Just to summarize on a high level for Twist Biopharma, as I mentioned, we're creating this whole suite of our library of libraries that we want to use for helping pharma and biotech companies discover antibodies for their biologics discovery efforts. Our flagship library is our hyperimmune library, which is a fully human naive library. Takes advantage of our Oligo Pool platform to create a very diverse, fully human library. We have, again, a whole suite of libraries with different scaffolds from fab, single chain, and VHH that, again, enable us to find high affinity antibodies to a whole host of different difficult to drug targets.
As I mentioned, we really want to focus on difficult to drug targets as well. We've actually created libraries focused on several different difficult to drug classes, including G protein-coupled receptors. We really pride ourselves on our ability to optimize antibodies using our TAO platform, which really takes advantage of our library platform coupled with the software I talked about before to enable us to make optimization libraries that are inspired from the natural human repertoire. Then finally, as Emily mentioned, we're pushing forward a lot of products derived from biopharma into the synbio component of Twist, and we're about to kick off a new alpha product within Twist to not only offer up the ability to synthesize DNAs encoding for antibodies, but also to make the physical antibody itself. Next slide.
Just again, on a high level for our drug discovery capabilities, the library of libraries that's derived from our silicon platform has been, again, really allowed us to create a whole panel of our library of libraries that allows us to go after any target we wish, and has been really game-changing in this space. Once we have those leads, we can of course use the TAO platform to optimize them to make them better. Again, it's really not only the library capability, but also this amazing software that we have that allows us to create optimization libraries around specific leads. Next slide. The way TAO works, just schematically is, again, we input the antibody sequence into our software. It gives us a whole series of Oligo Pool and sequences derived from the natural human repertoire.
We synthesize those oligos, put them into a library, and then we pan and screen them against the target. Shown here at the bottom is just one example where we've taken a parental PD-1 antibody and actually affinity matured it 72-fold to give us an optimized lead that now rivals many of the PD-1 antibodies that are on the market today. Next slide. Then we're also, as Emily mentioned, really focused on developing out and improving our library technology and doing some proof of concept discovery efforts against a number of targets. We've really focused on G protein-coupled receptors.
As I mentioned, they're a very difficult to drug class of targets. We've been able to find leads against a number of them shown on this slide, where we've not only found antibodies that bind very tightly to these receptors but also have amazing functional activity. Shown here is just one example where we've done panning and screening using our GPCR library against GLP-1 receptor. GLP-1 receptor is a receptor involved in sugar maintenance. You might be familiar with it in the field of diabetes. We actually found an antagonist of this receptor using our library that could be used for diseases resulting in where you have low levels of sugar or higher levels of insulin. What we see on this slide is just showing that our antibody very potently inhibits the signaling of GLP-1 receptor.
Also in an in vivo study, we were able to show that this antibody also maintains a high level of glucose and actually inhibits the receptor very strongly so that we can actually have high levels of sugar in this glucose tolerance study. Finally, one last exciting piece of information is derived from our SARS-CoV-2 case study. We've been trying to see if we could use these antibodies for other applications besides just therapeutics. Since rapid tests for SARS-CoV-2 are going to be really key to our opening up our economy, we're actually able to show that we can use our SARS-CoV-2 S1 antibodies in a lateral flow test. Shown on the left is just a dose titration of the spike protein in saliva.
You can actually see as you go from left to right, you can see that second lower band, it gets more intense, just showing that we can actually detect the spike protein. On the right is just a collection of negative saliva samples where we don't see that line. Again, really nice application of our SARS-CoV-2 S1 antibodies where we can actually not only use them for therapeutics, but also potentially for a lateral flow diagnostic test for the virus. Just to conclude, ways you can work with us, we really want to get our libraries out there into multiple partners to license them out. That's been really key and central to our success. We also want to do projects associated with utilizing those libraries, as well as projects to optimize antibodies using our TAO platform.
We continue to innovate and discover more antibodies to help validate our libraries. From that, we've actually come up with several leads that we want to potentially outlicense at some point. Finally, we are working very closely with our Synbio team to offer up screening services as well associated with libraries that people might make on their own and design on their own with the custom library team. Finally, as I mentioned, we're also trying to push out a new product called high throughput IgG, where we can, again, offer up the ability to not only synthesize hundreds, thousands of antibody genes, but also physical antibody as well.
Thank you very much, Aaron, for this overview. Next, we'll move on to our customer presentation. Before I introduce our next speaker, I want to remind you that you can either ask a verbal question through the phone or through the application, you can submit written questions. Next we'll hear from Dr. Robert Mabry from Takeda, who will tell us what he's doing in collaboration with Twist Biopharma.
Great. Thank you, Emily. Thank you to the Twist team for the invitation to speak with you today. I'm going to start with a brief overview of Takeda and Global Biologics and then transition over to our partnership with Twist. Next slide, please. This is our forward-looking statements. Next slide, please. Takeda is a global pharmaceutical organization with a presence in approximately 80 countries. Post acquisition of Shire, we're now around 50,000 members with a significant presence in the U.S. We have three main research and 36 manufacturing sites across the globe. I'll briefly touch on our vision and values on the next slide, but it is inherently reflected by the recognition we receive as a top employer across many countries. Next slide, please.
Throughout the 240 years of Takeda's existence, we have held our values dear to our work with a focus on patients and the development of innovative therapeutics to improve lives. The long history of Takeda is a impressive success story, and we continue to evolve our organization with a commitment to agility and innovation. We are steady in our vision and hold integrity at the forefront of our values and how we approach both science as well as our business practice. Next slide, please. For R&D, these are the six areas that we focus on. We are committed to cutting edge technologies and identifying automation solutions. There have been significant investments in R&D for Takeda, and I'll speak to those in the next slide, please. Looking at the investment in our R&D, this is an investment in both internal and external collaborations.
We have gone through an evolution of a small molecule focus to biologic focus. These are modalities similar to recombinant protein, cell and gene therapies, oncolytic viruses, viral delivery, microbiome. That diversification is a balance between internal and external partnerships. We have over 200 partnerships, and looking at what those partnerships yield is approximately 40 different new molecular entities in clinical stage assets. Our partnerships are a significant component to our success. Next slide, please. The drug discovery process is rather complicated. By no means is my intent to trivialize the process with this slide.
I think what is implied is that there is synergy that's needed across several different categories to really drive a successful pipeline. Choosing the right target, having the translational aspects allow you to identify novel targets, also how you engage with those targets, and whether you're wanting to move on beyond one single target or looking at multiple targets as part of your multifaceted approach. We are modality agnostic, which creates a lot of complexities, especially when you're seeking to diversify your portfolio across the different therapeutic areas that we mentioned, by no means is execution a small feat. Many ideas in pharma, they're ubiquitous. You'll find similar ideas, it's really the execution and the synergy with these other components that can drive success. Next slide, please. Looking at our partnerships, there is a greater focus for Takeda on earlier platform deals.
The diversification of the modalities, the ability to have external translational tools as well, and patient samples in biobanking. What I've been very impressed by Takeda is the flexibility and the different range of deal structures that have been finalized and have been successful with our external partners. This is kind of the flexibility that we also expect out of our partnerships. Looking at the external orientation, we do benchmark ourselves with industry. I think we've been very proud of the partnerships that we've been able to establish as part of our strategy. Moving to slide nine, please. Next slide. Looking at the evolution of our modality deployment, as I mentioned before, we are evolving our pipeline from a small molecule focus to a biologic focus.
What you see here is indicative of a stage of portfolio entry where there's more formal investments made for each one of these programs. That's really yielded a transformative pipeline in such a short amount of time, and that's certainly attributed to our leadership at Takeda. The topology of these different types of biologics are extremely complex. Really developing subject matter expertise in all of these areas is a very tall order. We try to leverage and build internally and balance that with the external access to platform technologies and know-how as part of our partnerships. For each one of these projects and modalities, we take multifaceted approaches. That creates a lot of complexity because the drug discovery process is not the same for these different modalities.
There is disparity, but what we need to balance is the external access to the technologies, our internal expertise, and really drive a multifaceted approach to really pressure test hypotheses and have thorough evaluation on our strategy. Next slide, please. Many of you have seen a different version of this across industry, and agility is one of the main components that we focus on, and we operate very similar to what you would see for a small biotech, multiple small biotechs within our research group. Looking at each one of these categories, they're comprised of many different processes that are very complex. If we think of this as an iteration, how can we compress this iteration? If we're going to fail, let's fail quickly.
If we can compress this iteration and reduce the number of iterations by making these processes more streamlined, that ultimately can create a competitive advantage for us. Our ability to pivot quickly is essential, but also our internal and external stakeholders. We need to share ownership across the board. The days of having a CRO throw things over the fence, that's very much beyond us, and we focus and commit a lot of time and investment in not only the due diligence and evaluation of the landscape, but also the fostering very healthy relationships with our external stakeholders. Next slide, please. Getting to our partnership with Twist. Leveraging the agility and expert know-how, that's a balance between Takeda and Twist.
We want to leverage both and the premier platforms of Twist, the library of libraries that you were seeing before and as Emily spoke to, the DNA buffet. This allows us to get access to custom libraries to create and generate constructs, reagents very quickly, and also the custom libraries that we want to use for our internal purposes. This agility is very important to us, and I think through our due diligence and the landscape analysis, we identified Twist as an ideal partner. That flexibility has not only been reflected in the science but also in the agreement we're getting in place. I've been very happy to see how fast we've been able to do this and very excited about the future.
Maybe at the next investor conference, we'll be able to share some of the case studies for how what we anticipated was realized through this partnership. I'm going to stop there. Again, thank you to the Twist team, and I can answer any questions you have.
Thank you very much. Next, we will move to the presentation from Invetx, and we'll hear from both Dr. Jürgen Horn and Dr. Bill Brondyk. Again, please continue to put in your questions, and we'll answer them at the end. With that, Jürgen, you want to go ahead?
Thank you. Thank you, Emily, and thank you for the opportunity to present at this event and to introduce Invetx, the animal health market, and our partnership with Twist. Invetx is an animal health biotech startup company, our mission is to close the innovation gap between human and animal health. Our model is unique in that it is a very capital-efficient virtual model that is leveraging strong partnerships with best-in-class human biotech companies. Our key partners are AbCellera, Twist, and WuXi Biologics. We do have an experienced leadership team that's composed out of experts from the human drug development expertise, as well as the animal health industry. Our platform sets a new standard for veterinary monoclonal antibodies, in that we can deliver fully canine and feline optimized and half-life extended monoclonal antibodies.
What is also very important, especially in the animal health industry, is access to a best-in-class product development and manufacturing for these product candidates. We already have a pipeline of six active programs in high-value markets in animal health. Two programs have been completed in the discovery phase, and the lead candidates have entered pilot studies in the target species this year. We also have built a proprietary half-life extension platform, which is ready to be applied to all programs. The value proposition in animal health is slightly different than it is on the human health side, as the size of the price is typically a bit smaller.
There is a strong return on investment, and that's based on the fast time to markets, the low product development cost in animal health, and the reduced risk of our programs as we are mainly using validated targets and validated technologies. We were able to close a Series A with $25.5 million just recently, and we're very happy that we were able to build a very solid shareholder base around that. If you go to the next slide, I would like to talk a little bit about the animal health market because many of you may not know it.
It is significantly smaller than the human pharma market, of course, but it is nevertheless a sizable market with strong market fundamentals and continuous growth of roughly 6% over decades now, even during challenging times like the financial crisis or even during the current situation, the veterinary businesses and industries are holding up quite well. There is a sizable number of pets, my slide here is focusing on the U.S. market. However, there are equally impressive numbers in other markets and impressive growth in developing markets. The total pet expenditure in the U.S. was estimated at $95 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow this year to $100 billion. This is mainly driven by increasing pet spending as well as increasing pet ownership.
If we move to the next slide, I want to point out that the differences in animal health to human health is that for the field of biotherapeutics in veterinary medicine is wide open. There is a huge innovation gap between human health and the veterinary markets. Monoclonal antibodies entered the human medicine field about 35 years ago, whereas on the veterinary side, the first monoclonal antibody, and to date, still the only monoclonal antibody on the market, was launched in 2017. This is especially surprising as human biotech offers a rich set of validated targets that are applicable, and where there is an unmet need on the veterinary side. The field for biotherapeutics is wide open, and we see that as an opportunity. Can monoclonal antibodies address these unmet needs?
We are absolutely convinced they can as they deliver targeted, safe therapies, and at convenient dosing intervals. This sounds maybe not so important on the human side, but on the veterinary side, it is very important that dosing intervals are longer, as it is quite difficult to dose a dog or a cat on a daily basis with a pill. More convenient dosing intervals not only make it more easier for the owners and veterinarians to apply the medication, it will increase compliance rate dramatically. The large animal health company, Zoetis, former Pfizer Animal Health, has already demonstrated that monoclonal antibodies can address these unmet needs and address the consumer and veterinary needs with the launch of Cytopoint, the currently only available monoclonal antibody on the market.
They do not itemize their sales figures any longer, but it is said that they will achieve $250 million in sales in 2020. Not only do these new drugs capture a big market share, they in fact build and expand the market segment as has been demonstrated quite impressively in atopic dermatitis, a market that has grown from roughly $300 million about 15 years ago to more than $1.5 billion. The same is expected, which is shown here on the graph to the right, for the canine pain market, when the antibodies that have been announced already by Zoetis will hit the market. If you go to the next slide. How do we approach this? Invetx's approach is unique in that we are a virtual company that is set up with strong external partnerships. That allows us to be quite lean and capital efficient.
In-house, we have the expertise for all areas that we need to discover and develop monoclonal antibodies and bring them to the market. All our research is conducted by external partners, and therefore it was very important to select the right partners, the right technologies that are advanced and can be tailored to the specific needs in veterinary medicine. We believe this is a strong competitive advantage in that it gives us the capacity and the capabilities which we would never be able to transfer at a small scale to a veterinary laboratory. With that, I want to hand over to Bill Brondyk, our CSO, to talk more about the collaboration with Twist and the value that is added to our company and our programs.
Next slide, please. I'd like to thank Twist Biopharma for inviting me to present. It's really my pleasure. As you'll see from just a few of my slides, they really play an integral part of our drug discovery process. At Invetx, we've developed for our drug discovery process really an integrated network that enables us to go seamlessly from a target sequence all the way to the clinical antibody lead. We've established IP in the half-life extension for both canine and feline IgGs. Through all of our drug discovery efforts, we're really acquiring what I think is some deep knowledge about canine and feline IgGs, including the antibody repertoires and the CMC properties. As Jürgen mentioned, we're a very small but experienced organization that's really laser-focused on delivering the best antibody leads in a timely fashion for the animal health market. Next slide, please.
This slide provides an overview of our antibody discovery platform, and we've been using what we think are some of the best technologies to deliver the next-generation veterinary monoclonal antibodies. For the initial part of the antibody discovery, we are using two platforms, both an in vitro and an in vivo platform. For the in vitro platform, we've partnered with Twist Biopharma, and they are currently in the midst of generating fully canine and fully feline antibody phage display libraries. For our in vivo strategy, we've partnered with AbCellera, and what they do is they take B cells from immunized animals and use their advanced microfluidic technology to screen these B cells. Further downstream, our screening strategy is robust.
We're screening for affinity, cross-reactivity, specificity, and of course, functional activity, along with developability properties, because we don't want to see any unwelcome surprises downstream in either CMC development or manufacturing. Sometimes the hits that we identify can be carried right out to a lead, but other times there's optimization required. For example, an antibody, if it came from a rodent, may need to be caninized or felinized, or needs to alter the affinity, so affinity mature. For all these efforts, we've partnered once again with Twist Biopharma. Once we've identified the optimal lead of the variable domain, we fuse that to our Fc variant, which extends the half-life of the IgG. In the next two slides, I'll describe in greater detail how Twist Biopharma is helping out for our whole drug discovery platform.
The Twist Biopharma, they're once again contributing in two ways with the in vitro antibody discovery and the antibody optimization, which you heard from Aaron, is called TAO or Twist Antibody Optimization. These two technologies all have as their core is the Twist Bioscience DNA-based platform, which you heard about from Emily. This silicon technology for me is just incredible and really allows for speed and precision in the DNA synthesis, which is really part of the Twist advantage. We have an exclusive relationship with Twist Biopharma for the field of animal health. As I mentioned previously, Twist is currently making both fully canine and feline antibody phage display libraries. What we've done is Twist has generated a database of natural canine and feline CDR repertoires by doing next-gen sequencing on PBMCs from both canines and felines, so cats and dogs.
Twist has an incredible amount of expertise in phage display selections and screening, including cell-based technologies. Then, as I mentioned, our characterization analysis will be very thorough. The other area that they will be contributing and are contributing currently is their Twist Antibody Optimization platform. They've created a veterinary equivalent to their human platform, which you heard about from Aaron. Once again, on the cartoon on the right, you can see kind of in a schematic how this process occurs. The input antibodies can be basically anything as long as the antibody binds to the target of interest and the species of interest. It can be a chimeric antibody made in a rodent, it could be a canine or feline antibody, it could even be a human therapeutic antibody. As long as the affinity is somewhat good, these can be used.
They use these sequences in their proprietary software along with their database with a natural canine and feline repertoires to develop a library based on that sequence. The library, once again, consists of only natural CDR and frameworks found in canine or feline. They do the selections and screens, and then the lead antibody will be affinity optimized and fully canine or feline. Also, as Aaron mentioned, they can remove all potential sequence liabilities. Next slide. These two technologies are what we're really working with Twist on right currently. We did have an initial project, and I want to just briefly go over that. This was a protein engineering project, and it was to extend feline IgG half-life. Our objective was to generate feline Fc variants with an increased affinity to feline FcRn.
A similar strategy has been done on the human side and very successfully. Twist custom designed a precise phage display library of the Fc, feline Fc, they generated defined residue substitutions in more than 50 feline Fc positions. On average, each molecule had two positions substituted and a very high diversity of the library of over 10 to the 10th. They completed the selection screens and characterizations, selections with feline FcRn at both low and high pH. By high, I mean physiological pH, and completed ELISA screens. For the output, they sequenced by next gen sequencing and then reformatted those Fcs into full IgGs and completed the complete analytics, which includes binding kinetics to feline FcRn at both low and high pH, aggregation by SEC, and thermal stability by nanoDSF. The results, frankly, were outstanding.
They identified Fc variants with the desired binding characteristics to feline FcRn at more than 20 positions. Just to give you an example how successful this was, because the extension of feline IgG half-life is so important for our platform, we did another approach in parallel with a different company. They used an NNK mutagenesis approach, and they were only able to identify Fc variants at three positions. These Fc variants have been tested in a feline PK study, and they've been shown to increase half-life by at least two and a half fold. We filed IP, and now this is part of our platform.
Just to close with my discussion about how we're working with Twist, I wanted to just give a few comments on what I think of the collaboration so far, and it's really been enjoyable and, as you can see from this one project, incredibly productive. They're really experts in antibody discovery, protein engineering, and computational biology. Their expertise in computational biology, I feel, really gives them a differentiation from the competition. As a partner for all of our projects, I find them to be very collaborative. There's open communication. They really come up with innovative solutions for very challenging technical issues, and the output has just been outstanding. Next slide. Just to summarize for our platform, for antibody discovery, we have both an in vitro and in vivo approach. With the in vitro, we're working with Twist.
For antibody optimization, we have the ability to caninize and felinize and also affinity mature, and all this again is with Twist. We've developed a half-life extension technology, so this will be used for all of our monoclonals going forward. We've really worked hard to optimize our timeline, and our goal is to generate lead candidates within 6- 12 months. Now, next slide, and I think I'll turn it over now back to Jürgen.
Thank you, Bill. This is great. This is just a quick snapshot of our portfolio and where we stand today with the programs. Bill described in more detail about our platform technology, the half-life extension, and the proof of concept for that has been established, and Twist played an important role in that. We currently have six active programs, and at the moment, Twist is involved in three of those programs. We foresee more involvement in future programs as well as we go forward and start new programs. If you go to the next slide, this is really just a summary who we are. We believe we are really well positioned to take innovation leadership in this sector of animal health.
The monoclonal antibody platform we built with our partners is a very strong platform and sets a new standard for veterinary monoclonal antibodies in the animal health industry. We couldn't have done it without Twist. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Jürgen and Bill. You were one of the early adopters of the Twist platform, and we very much appreciate the vote of confidence and the business. Last but not least, we're going to hear from Dr. Carsten Linnemann. We've been working with him and his team for a while, and they are doing absolutely fantastic science. I will let Carsten go ahead.
Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Aaron and Emily, for inviting Neogene to join today. What I would like to do in the next few minutes is to introduce Neogene, our unique team, our science, which we believe really pushes the frontier of what is possible with engineered T-cell therapies, and most importantly, how we partner with Twist and the Biopharma division in developing novel engineered T-cell therapies for cancer patients in need. I will make some forward-looking statements. Next slide, please. The team of Neogene is really a very unique blend of, on the one hand, individuals that have dedicated their scientific careers in understanding T-cell receptor biology and exploring it to develop cancer therapies, and people who have really shown that cell therapy can be not only an effective treatment for cancer, but also become an industrial reality and a commercial drug.
I will not walk you through the whole slide and all the names, just to point out a few key individuals. Ton Schumacher is a co-founder of Neogene, the Chairman of our SAB, and really a key opinion leader for T-cell receptor gene therapy and neoantigen biology. We've been fortunate to work with Arie Belldegrun, former CEO of Kite Pharma and now Executive Chairman of Allogene Therapeutics, who has been supporting the company since its inception. We most recently announced that Franz Humer, former CEO and Chairman of Roche Holding, has joined the company as Executive Chairman of the Board. Next slide, please. In September this year, we announced our Series A financing. We have been fortunate to find support for our mission of developing novel engineered T-cell therapies from a strong consortium of cell therapy experienced investors.
We also have been very excited to actually announce our first strategic partnership this month with Twist, and this is what I would like to spend the next few minutes on explaining how we work with Twist and how the library of libraries approach not only is applicable to antibody discovery as you have seen in the previous two presentations, but also really can expand into the T-cell receptor therapeutic space. Next slide, please. The problem we at Neogene try to address is the observation that T-cell therapy, while being widely successful in B-cell malignancies, is still largely unavailable for most solid tumors. The approach we have developed at Neogene really combines aspects of the two dominant adoptive T-cell therapy approaches that are available.
What we have developed is a very unique way how we access the therapeutically active component of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, which by themselves have been used for three decades successfully to treat certain patients with solid cancers. We use these receptors in an engineered T-cell therapeutic approach by introducing them into patient-derived blood T-cells, which are, after this genetic modification, infused back into the patient. This is really the therapeutic approach that has revolutionized how we treat B-cell malignancies today. We believe that combination of these two approaches provides us not only with a safe but also potentially very effective novel engineered T-cell therapy that is broadly applicable to a spectrum of solid tumors. Next slide, please. This slide gives an overview of the therapeutic approach from start to end. I'll walk you through.
Everything really starts off with a routine tumor biopsy, and we use this tumor biopsy for some in-depth, but nevertheless, fairly routine genetic analysis. The information we derive from this biopsy is twofold. First, we determine which mutations are found in the patient's tumor. In a second set of analysis, we also determine which T-cell receptor sequences are found in this tumor biopsy. Essentially, which T-cell receptors are expressed by the tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes.
We then use this genetic information in combination with high-throughput DNA synthesis to create libraries of genes that allow us to express both the mutated proteins as well as the T-cell receptor sequences in reporter cells, which are then brought together in a next step in a functional genetic screening platform, which in essence, ultimately delivers with very high specificity and high sensitivity those T-cell receptor sequences that are specific for certain mutations identified in the tumor. Once these T-cell receptor sequences are identified, we use them to engineer a cell product, which ideally is multispecific and that can be subsequently used to treat the patient. Next slide, please. The reason why we are trying to target mutated proteins, so-called neoantigens, is our belief that these kinds of antigens really represent the prototypic example of an ideal target for these kinds of therapies.
They're absolutely tumor-specific because their origin lies in the mutation, which inherently is connected to the evolution of the tumor, and hence, these mutated proteins are really restricted in their occurrence to the tumor cells. They're at the same time very strong antigens for tumor rejection because they, in essence, represent a foreign sequence to the human immune system, just like a viral protein would be. There's really no inherent immune tolerance mechanism that may dampen a T-cell response against these antigens. The flip side and the challenge with these antigens is that targeting neoantigens in cancer means a fully personalized treatment. Any given set of mutations found in a patient's tumor is typically confined to that particular individual.
That means a mutation you successfully target for that particular patient will not be reoccurring in another patient in the vast majority of all cases. The reason why we believe it's worth targeting these antigens is depicted on the next slide. We believe these kind of treatments can address some of the fundamental challenges with current neoantigen-specific T-cell therapies. This kind of approach, working from a routine tumor biopsy and using synthetic TCR components, overcomes scalability hurdles that would be associated with needing large amounts of biospecimens that possibly have to be removed by surgery, as well as handling viable cells from these biospecimens. The genetic screening approach we use also allows us to cast a very wide net in identifying neoantigen-specific T-cell receptor leads, and I'll come back to that a little bit more on the next slide.
Thirdly, the engineering approach we're using, we believe can successfully address some of the challenges that are associated with a dysfunctional immune system that you will find in patients with advanced metastatic disease. Engineering t cells means you can control the cell number, and you have an opportunity to also engineer the potency of these cells to, for example, address immunosuppressive microenvironments that may be encountered in solid tumors. Next slide, please. Synthetic biology is really key to the t cell receptor discovery process, which is depicted here again. Everything starts off with targeted genomic sequencing and then synthetic library generation to replicate the genetic information that is relevant for the subsequent screening that will deliver the t cell receptor sequences.
The screening platform we use provides the broadest possible repertoire of T cell receptor sequences because it can access both fundamental classes of T cell receptors that occur in humans, MHC class I and MHC class II-restricted T cell receptors. The platform provides tremendous sensitivity because not only can we tap into the tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte repertoire, a repertoire of T cells that is enriched for neoantigen-specific T cell receptors, but it's also extremely sensitive because of the functional genetic screening where DNA sequencing provides for sensitivities that are otherwise unfeasible. Most importantly, the use of synthetic components to replace patient-derived components allows us to standardize this process to a high degree. Next slide, please. Really, synthetic DNA tools are fundamental to what we want to do.
They allow us to achieve scale because we can sequence genomic information and afterwards rapidly synthesize those DNA sequences that are relevant for us. Having synthetic DNA libraries for genes allows us to use reporter cell lines, which provides for a highly standardized process, and then largely very important for a fully personalized Neogene T cell therapy. You need to have access to high throughput DNA vector production because these kind of approaches realistically will require non-viral gene delivery to perform the genetic modifications. These are all areas we have been working on very successfully with Twist, we recently expanded this into a whole new area. Next slide, please. We entered into a collaboration with the Twist Biopharma division to develop what we call a synthetic TCR library.
Really the vision behind this collaboration is that we believe that the tools Twist has developed and the tools Neogene has developed will allow ultimately to develop a way that makes T cell receptor genes accessible with similar ease as modern antibody screening. The way we're going to approach this will be that we're going to use Twist capability to synthesize TCR libraries with maximal possible diversity, utilizing their best-in-class DNA synthesis capabilities, as well as their expertise in building precise libraries and screening them. We'll combine that with Neogene's expertise in identifying therapeutic T cell receptor sequences of interest and merge this together in a rational screening process. In first instance, what we will do is we're going to develop TCR candidates against two undisclosed tumor targets. Really our vision goes beyond that, and I would like to show you that on the next slide.
Because ultimately, we believe that these type of synthetic TCR libraries may be able to accelerate fully personalized TCR discovery as well. As you may remember from the slides I showed you, currently with the help of Twist, we are creating TCR libraries for every single patient that are tailored for that particular patient. You could envision that once a synthetic TCR library is available and can be screened efficiently, that you can ultimately replace these personalized TCR libraries with a universal synthetic TCR library. The process would then essentially only require to identify the neoantigen targets for every patient, and then we would identify suitable T cell receptor leads within the synthetic TCR library using a novel screening approach we're developing together with Twist Biopharma. That would ultimately provide us with TCR leads to engineer a cell product for the patient. Next slide, please.
We at Neogene are tremendously excited about the fully personalized T cell receptor gene therapy we're developing. We believe we have a very unique team, a novel paradigm-changing science, but we're very dependent on working with aggressive innovators like Twist and the Twist Biopharma division, and we're tremendously excited about the collaboration we recently entered with them.
Thank you very much, Carsten. Next, we will enter the Q&A session. Operator, will you start with the questions from the phone?
Absolutely. We will now begin our question and answer session. To ask a question via the phone, you can press star and then one on your touch-tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. If you are currently watching the webcast but have dialed in to ask a question, please remember to mute the webcast to avoid audio feedback on the call. At this time, we'll pause for a moment to assemble our roster. Our first question from the phone today will come from Doug Schenkel with Cowen.
Hey, good morning and good afternoon, everybody, thank you for taking a couple of our questions. Emily, thanks for organizing this with your team for bringing some of your partners out like you did today. I guess just a basic question. As we think about some of the different opportunities you've outlined for Twist Biopharma. From an investor standpoint, I have a couple along these lines, what are the different economic models? I guess what I'm getting at is, in which of these examples is Twist simply providing product to customers and partners, versus what opportunities are there where Twist could do that but also participate in downstream economics?
Thank you, everybody. Apologies for the technical difficulties. Such is what happens when we are virtual. Doug, you were asking a question. We will answer the beginning of your question, and we'll try to get back to you for the remaining. Your question, what are the different economic models that we're considering for Biopharma? There are a few. The first one that we are currently pursuing is to have partner choose us to do work for them, and that can be licensing our content, that could be having Twist do discovery, that can be Twist do optimization.
That the economic model is some upfront payment, and some participation in the upside with milestones, and/or royalties. To be very transparent, initially, we were not always getting milestones and royalties, but now that we have data, we're able to get those. The economics are, I would say, typical discovery deals. Although, as you know, in pharma, more risk means less economics. As there is more of that coming in, we're able to get.
Again, this is the operator. Difficulties. Thank you for your patience. We're trying to figure this out.
Now I hear some echo. Doug, that is the first economic model. The second economic model is that, I would call them partnership. The second economic models are collaboration. For instance, we have a published collaboration with Schrödinger. In that case, we bring our technology with the collaborator's technology, and we do some drug discovery jointly, where there's no exchange of money. They cover their cost, we cover our cost. Any therapeutics, any molecule that is discovered, is jointly owned. If or when those molecules get licensed out or spinned out or move forward by either one of the two partners or a third party, then the economic value is shared. That's the second model. That's a partnership model. The third model, which we are starting to get into, is a Twist-sponsored program.
We have the confidence that the platform works, we've done some work internally to pick what we believe are important targets. We use our own Twist resources to develop, discover, optimize assets against those targets with the vision of spinning them out, licensing them out once we have discovered them. By doing the work ourself, we believe we'll be able to extract a higher economics value when those get spinned out. I will say that those are the three buckets of economic value coming to the Twist Biopharma division. In addition to that, I'd say there's also some real synergy with the synthetic biology business. For instance, the high throughput IgG production that Aaron built for Twist Biopharma will now be available to the broad community through the synthetic biology business. Therefore, we are a one-stop shop for Biopharma.
They can buy products from Twist and do the work themselves. They can buy genes, they can buy IgGs, they can buy library, or they can have a service agreement with Biopharma where we do more of the work, and we're happy to serve all our customers along that spectrum. That's what I think answers your first question.
Yeah, that's super helpful, Emily. Just one thing is, I think in listening to the answers to your questions as we were coming back from the technical challenges, I at least heard clearly number two, the partnership, number three, development of your own product and what you just described in the synergies with Synbio. I just want to make sure the first one, which at least I missed part of as you were coming back online, I think you described it as a collaborator. That's where customers are paying for your products and services, and there's no economic tail. Just to make sure we got all three of the models you talked about. Is that right?
Oh, sorry. Let me rephrase quickly. The first one is a partnership, where we get paid upfront milestones and/or royalties. The partner decides what work they want us to do. That's the first one. The second one is a collaboration, where there's no exchange of money upfront, where the collaborator pays their own cost, we pay our own cost, and the molecule is owned jointly. The third business model is the Twist-sponsored research, where we are developing our own antibodies against our own target with the intent to license them out later.
Okay. Super helpful. Just a related follow-up, then I'll get back into the queue and do some of the other great folks on the line. How does Twist prioritize which customers to work with? I ask this because just over the last hour or so, we've heard from one multinational pharma, one animal health company, and an emerging T-cell style pharma company. I guess I'm just wondering, are you prioritizing certain parts of vertical, and would you consider limiting or even going exclusively with certain customers in a specific vertical? Any details you could share on your thinking there would be really helpful. Thank you.
Thank you, Doug. Aaron, do you want to start answering that question?
Yeah, of course. One theme that I think you see throughout the three collaborators you heard today is just them seeing us as a partner. We want to work and find people that see us as a part of their projects and a partner to help them move things forward. As Emily mentioned, we're not just a service provider, we're really a key attribute in their discovery project. That is, I think, one thing we want to probably potentially prioritize, is really looking for strategic partnerships. The three companies you heard today are definitely examples of that. That would probably be one of the main priorities of choosing if we need to. Today, we haven't had to do that yet, but I can see as we become more and more successful, we might need to do that.
Again, I think we'll also expand our capacity and our ability at the same time.
Yeah. I think to build on what you said, Aaron Sato, totally agree. Doug Schenkel, if your question is around capacity, in the first part of the business model, which is a partnership, since we get paid upfront payment, as those number of partnership increases, we'd be able to scale our capacity. There's no real capacity limitation, since again, that work is paid for. Of course, if someone comes in with a big check, we probably would be willing to offer exclusivity for some regions or for some targets or for some diseases. We are open for business, and our goal is to maximize the economic return to our investors. Operator, do you want to?
Yeah. Our next question will come from Tycho Peterson with JP Morgan.
Hey, thank you. Question for Aaron, I guess. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more on some of the initiatives you highlighted, the timelines for the ACE2 antibody program. Are you going into the clinic next month? How do you think about that opportunity? You alluded to a lateral flow test. That's fairly product market, but I'm curious how you think about timeline partnering on lateral flow, and then on ACE2 production, how quickly could you scale up there? Thanks.
Just to be clear, on the in vivo studies, those are really the S1 antibodies initially. On the ACE2 antibodies, we're doing some additional in vitro tests to see if we may have some leads there. That's where we are currently with the therapeutic side of the COVID project. Can you clarify the question again on the lateral flow test? I didn't understand that.
I'm just curious because you alluded to potentially partnering up commercializing something on that front. How do you think about commercializing something on the lateral flow side?
Yeah. Again, we're still working with our third party collaborators on that. We really can't comment quite yet, but as you mentioned, it's an exciting space and we're continuing to see if we can bring forward our antibodies for a second application, in this case diagnostics. Which I think, as you see, it's a really important part of opening up eventually. The differentiator for our assay, I think, which might be helpful in working with others, is just that it might potentially be very rapid in terms of being potentially useful in saliva, which we really see as differentiating.
They made a comment on the COVID case study using antibody data, saying that they're very [greatly sourced or produced]. I'm just curious, can you maybe talk to a little bit more on the data, the quality of the data that you have seen?
Yeah. For SARS-CoV-2 S1 antibodies, it's been a pretty challenging project, more on the back end for testing. I think as in terms of just validating our antibodies, we were really lucky to find actually four different sites where we could do the testing of all our antibodies to confirm the potency that we're seeing. Across all four sites, we saw a very common set of antibodies that continued to be very potent in the live virus neutralization. That was really key for us to show that the antibodies are very potent, and they were also in the range based on literature that we've been seeing to be in a good range to potentially be used as therapeutics.
I think the combination of all the different sites plus the comparison to other antibodies that are in publications gives us a good sense that we're on the right track.
A question for the Invetx folks, if they're still on the line. I'm just curious, they mentioned the AbCellera partnership. Curious, I know that's more in vivo and they've used this largely in vitro, but curious if you can kind of compare and contrast what you're getting from AbCellera versus Twist and why the decision to go with AbCellera as maybe bringing that analysis or something like BLI. Thanks.
Thank you for the question. Happy to answer that. Maybe Bill, you want to jump in if my answer is incomplete. We reached out to multiple companies to select the best technology and partner to tailor a platform for animal health. We wanted and now have multiple approaches to discover monoclonal antibodies. Discovering monoclonal antibody is not sufficient. We also need to optimize it for the needs. Therefore, we brought the different partners together that we thought would facilitate that the best. For each program that we are intending to start and each target, we select the technology or technologies that we think are the most promising ones. Depending on the output, we will decide whether we need to optimize or not, including whether we need to caninize or not. We see this not as competitive at all.
We see this actually as a nice integrated platform between the two companies. AbCellera and Twist deliver and provide very unique technologies that both add a lot of value to our platform and enable us to really generate the best possible antibodies for the veterinary markets. I'm not sure, Bill, whether you want to add anything to that, but I think that's kind of the big picture.
Yeah. Just a quick comment. I would say having both an in vitro and an in vivo platform is really advantageous because the two platforms are complementary. As you kind of alluded to, there are certain times with certain targets where it's advantageous to use one over the other, and for really high-value targets, it's best to do both to really get a good diversity of antibodies.
Thank you. Then maybe one last one for Emily. A higher level question, we've gotten it from investors, which is just on the cost side, and it does tie into some of what we're talking about today. The cost for you on the fragments is obviously much lower than most of your peers in the market. On the clonal side, that's not necessarily the case. The question is why does the cost advantage for fragments not necessarily translate over to clonal for you guys?
On the gene synthesis side, our fragments are $0.07 per base compared to the market average of $0.15 per base. About half the price for non-clonal fragments. On clonal fragments, our price is $0.09 per base for short genes and $0.15 per base for long genes. My read of the market when we compete, the clonal costs are in the $0.20-$0.25 per base for short genes and $0.40-$0.50 per base for long gene. I'm not really aware of strong competitive pressure that we're getting from competitors on price. I think our prices are very attractive, and in addition to that, we offer the ability to have massive scale.
You get that price not only if you want one gene, but for our competition, if you want to get 1,000 genes at the same time, it is very difficult for the competition to deliver a large number of genes in a short period of time. Whereas for us, that's what we do every day. I'm not really seeing the price pressure yet on the clonal gene. I think we are actually the one putting the pressure on the competition.
Okay, that's helpful. Actually, maybe one more before I hop off for the Neogene folks. I'm just curious, as we think about the TCR therapy approach, how you think your platform compares to what Adaptive is doing with Genentech, because they seem to be taking somewhat of a similar approach. Thanks.
Yeah, I hope you will understand it's difficult for me to comment on other companies' approaches. I think on a high level, we're excited about our platform for a few reasons. First one is we really believe there's value in working from a routine tumor biopsy and utilizing the validated therapeutic potential of TIL cells. And the second characteristic is we believe it's really important to have full access to both class I and class II TCRs, which our platform provides.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Tycho.
Our next question will come from Vijay Kumar with Evercore.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Appreciate the team putting together the presentation. It's fascinating. It's certainly helpful. Maybe one very simple high-level question, Emily. You guys make really high-quality oligos. I think that's slide number 12 where you talk about your differentiation as being human-derived, high quality, and unlimited DNA buffet. Is competition not doing these things? Maybe just spend a quick minute on, is competition doing non-human derived? Is that the differentiation, or why is that with such a high quality going to stand out in this market?
Yeah, that's a great question. Maybe I'll start, and I can ask Aaron Sato to add to my answer. At a high level, the drug discovery process is finding the needle in a haystack. You need to create a library of high diversity, and we're able to achieve a diversity of 10 billion variants in a tube. Then there's a downstream screening process to find out of those 10 billion, which is the one or the 10 or the hundreds that have the affinity and the function needed. At a high level, the goal is to create that library of 10 billion variants. Others can do it, but how that is typically done is by creating random mutations.
For instance, when you synthesize an oligo at one position, you can put an A, or you can put all four bases, and you can do that many times. You create a lot of variants. You can achieve very cheaply very high diversity. The problem is that the diversity is completely random. You don't control really what's happening. A lot of the mutants that you create could never be a drug because they just don't follow the rules of the human repertoire. In contrast to that, because at Twist, we have the capacity to make a lot of oligos from scratch in a way that's explicit. Each of those mutants is chosen in a computer. You can create a file with exact mutations that follow the rules of the human repertoire.
When we build it, you actually explicitly chose each of the mutants. You can have a library that is much higher value because you don't have, excuse my French, you don't have garbage DNA. You have real mutants that you chose. That is why our library is better. Maybe, Aaron, is there anything that you'd like to add?
Yeah, I'll just add on top of that, again, I think I mentioned it before, the ability to use Oligo Pools to build libraries. It gives you this really tight control to, as Emily mentioned, really create libraries that aren't full of garbage, and they're just all these basically high-quality antibody sequences that potentially you can pull out and that will bind and potentially be developable against your target. Another really huge advantage of the Twist platform that a lot of others can't do is just this ability to scale the number of oligos in a pool. That again gives us huge diversity in the different regions of an antibody that's enabled by the Silicon platform.
Again, the advantage of Oligo Pools in general, but also just the scale at which we can synthesize oligos in a pool allows the antibody side of our business to be really creative in making unprecedented libraries that no one else has ever been able to make.
Understood. No, that's helpful. I had two quick follow-ups, one for the panelist and one for you guys. Aaron Sato, Emily, I guess when you take this process, I guess going down to biopharma, I think you mentioned antibody discovery. Maybe in a very simple step, maybe explain, so once you have this library of 10 billion libraries, what do you do with that? Are you synthesizing antibodies, or maybe just that step from creating the library to identifying the specific antibody? How does that happen? Why is it that you're able to compress this process into five or six weeks? That seems like a really short timeframe. Maybe explain that part.
You want to take that, Aaron?
Sure. I always say one of the major bottlenecks in antibody discovery and optimization is DNA. It's been a bottleneck for almost my entire career, and now I'm actually working at a company where that's not a bottleneck. We can quickly make libraries. We can quickly make genes. And it's really just operating and doing the workflow and automating that process. That enables us to really compress the time and make it faster and do a lot of things in parallel that I've never been able to do before in my career. I think the combination of the expertise that we bring to antibody discovery, coupled with this amazing DNA technology that we have, allows us to make it much faster than I've been able to do in my past.
Got you. Maybe one for the panelists here, Dr. Mabry, Horn and Linnemann. When you deal with Twist, maybe explain to us how these relationships develop. Do you use them for perhaps a one-off project, and then you see these results coming out in a few weeks time, and then that allows you to broaden this into a strategic partnership? Is that how these things process? Is your typical order, I don't know, I'm making up a number, let's say it's $10,000, and then once it evolves into a strategic partnership, does this go into millions of dollars? Is that how we should be thinking about Twist partnership with Biopharma?
Robert, you want to start?
Sure. I'll start. Thank you for the question. To not be too vague, it's a range of everything that you just mentioned. We do have small projects. We have DNA synthesis or a construct needs to be produced versus the more high level transfer of libraries so that we can dive into off-the-shelf diversities. Again, these libraries of libraries that have already been developed, and the confidence that they're using design space in a very cerebral manner. When I say design space rather than random mutagenesis, looking at specific residues, that's the power of the technology versus the old school way of creating diversities within NNK. The more you can focus on that, the more information you can yield just based on the output of your lead candidate panel.
That can feed back into your design, and to utilize and maybe through iterations, even improve the design of your libraries. I think that's where Aaron and the team at Twist are going. They want to create more libraries, and they want to get better at it as time goes on. That's outside of the custom library work that we're doing with them to where we have our own ideas of what libraries we would like to generate. It could go from a very simple construct order, which is not very expensive, to utilizing all of these libraries, custom and off-the-shelf libraries with the appropriate milestones and royalties that have been agreed upon. We're just at the very forefront of doing this, but this technology is automatable.
That's a standard benchmark, I think, for Biopharma is to have selections ongoing, really leverage automation solutions, and that hopefully will yield a large number of projects that will benefit from the Twist technology. It's difficult for me to answer that question, and we'll just have to wait to see how the logistics stack up over the next year. We are leveraging the platform in that manner.
Thank you, Robert. Jürgen or Bill, anything you'd like to add based on your experience?
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I want to say we don't see Twist as a CRO or service provider. We see it as a long-term partner. Of course, we started off with one product initially, and we saw the power of the platform, and it kind of evolved from there. We have multiple projects running, and we are planning to do multiple projects more with no end in sight, really. I think if that answers your question, it's really a long-term strategic partnership that we see with Twist. As their technology evolves, our technology is evolving with it, and that's a big advantage for us.
Thank you. Carsten, anything else you'd like to add from your point of view?
Yeah, I think we have a very similar position. I think Twist for us really is a thought partner, not a CRO. I think many of the projects we pursue together actually arise out of a shared belief in the power of synthetic biology and discussing the problems we see in our case in the space of engineered T-cell therapies. The discussions are usually highly interesting, and most of the projects actually arise out of these scientific discussions we have among the teams and have actually yield a number of, I would argue, non-standard projects. One of them I just showed you a few minutes ago with the synthetic TCR library. Beyond that, of course, we're also using the other products Twist is offering. We have an antibody campaign with Twist. We're buying synthetic DNA, of course, as well.
Fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen, for taking the time. This was helpful.
Our next question comes from Catherine Schulte with Baird.
Hi. Thanks for putting this together and taking our questions. Yes, first one for Dr. Mabry. I know Takeda has also worked with Adimab in the past. What drove you to choose Twist here, and how would you compare and contrast the offerings and capabilities between those two companies? If either of the other panelists has comments on what other companies they considered and what led them to select Twist.
Sure. Thank you for the question. One thing that I try not to be in the habit of is talking about necessarily other platforms in an investor call, but what I can give you is kind of a high-level understanding of what our thought process is. Similar to, I believe, what Bill was mentioning, having access to multiple technologies is very important. The target classes that you're working on, the indication, the modality that you needed to deploy, it is very important to have those technologies at your access, whether that's internally or externally. As a Takeda group that is building a premier global biologics group, we've begun to expand our access to the ability to generate antibodies very quickly from display systems as well as in vivo systems.
I didn't go through our overall strategy on how we deploy all of these technologies, but I think Twist is a significant component when it comes to library assembly, library design, again, really leveraging the computational power, and then the phage display systems that they have for off-the-shelf. That fills a rather big bucket. I think from a high level, when you're thinking about supporting six different therapeutic areas, and global biologics is managing 50-60 projects at any given moment, we have to have access to those technologies and look at them in an orthogonal way. The ability to quickly develop libraries with diversities that have been tailored for a specific project is very powerful. Again, time gets lost in these iterations, and it's amazing, just looking back 10 years ago, 15 years ago, how long it took just to get a gene in place.
It is very fast, and that's what we leverage to really accelerate. Hopefully that answers your question.
Yep, absolutely. I guess one for you, Emily. For the high-throughput IgG production launch, how should we think about pricing for that offering and timing of when that will be available?
Yeah. That platform for high-throughput IgG production has been used internally for a while now by Aaron's team. The commercial team at Twist, they're saying, "Oh, we can make that available to more customers." As Aaron mentioned, we are, I would say, in alpha or beta testing with a few partners. We've been shipping IgG proteins to outside parties. We're following the standard Twist product launch, which is when we launch fully it will be at scale, meaning you can come, and you want 1,000 antibodies, IgGs, no problem. That scale to get it really right takes a little bit of time, because you have to integrate everything. You integrate the e-commerce, you have to integrate the invoicing, you have to integrate the shipping. It has to be almost touchless from a human point of view.
There's quite a bit of software to develop. What that means is that outside customers are right now using IgG from Twist, but it will take a little bit of time to make it available at scale, where anybody can just go on the web and order it. From our point of view, we have confidence that we can deliver a high scale and speed. In terms of pricing, we have not publicly disclosed the pricing, but our philosophy usually is to leverage automation to have lower viable cost, which means that we can be very aggressive pricing-wise. The benefit is that with an aggressive pricing, the customer can do more work, and so therefore they are more likely to choose us.
The benefit to Twist is that our customers have a fixed budget, and so if we're competitive, we get a chance to get all of that budget. Ultimately, the patient also wins because since more shots on goal are taken, you get to a better outcome. Definitely the pricing would be aggressive in the spirit of what we do. Still, we want to achieve good margins thanks to our platform.
Great. Thank you.
Again, if you are dialed into the phone line and would like to ask a question, just press star and then one. Our next question comes from Puneet Souda with SVB Leerink.
Hey, thanks, Emily and team, and thanks, Aaron, for getting this event ready and partners on the line that this session has been really helpful. A couple of key questions here that are maybe not addressed or not addressed in depth that we've been getting from investors. Emily, just starting on the milestone payments and the economics, could you walk us through the framework of milestone payments and royalties longer term? Because I think the real question here is that the drug discovery process is a multi-year process. We're looking at 5-10 years. Clearly milestone payments for antibody optimization for the targets are going to be important here in the near term. As Twist Biopharma is getting off the ground, could you walk us through maybe the size and the pace of these milestone payments, and maybe what you see in an average model.
I assume these payments would be small to start with and then sort of increase over time because the royalties are not going to be visible till the drug actually is approved, which is several years away. Maybe just if you could talk through that. Then is there any expectation for the number of annual contracts that you want to have here given sort of the early stages of the development of a number of these projects?
Thank you, Puneet. Great questions. The first question is around details of the economic model. What's important for us is that the upfront payment pays for the work because we cannot sponsor other people, our partners' work. We make sure that the upfront payment at least covers our costs with some margin. As we are successful, I'm basically building a stack of milestones on royalties. You are correct that royalties will come in later. There is some advantages to for instance, the pet market because it's maybe a bit faster to get to a launch product. Between now and the royalties, there will be some milestones. In terms of reporting the economic value, we report every quarter the orders, so that's the upfront payment.
As Aaron does the work and delivers onto what we do for our partners, we capture that orders into revenue. You can get a sense from the delta between orders and revenue, how fast we are in doing the project. That's the only thing that we can guide to in the short term. Milestones royalty will all be upside. Initially, we will not be guiding on those because we're not really in control of the speed at which those milestones and royalty gets delivered. The one thing I can say is that we expect that the majority of the economic value will come from the milestones and royalty. The upfront payment is very useful to us because it enables us to participate and build a stack of milestones royalty that will deliver economic value over time. Then you had a second question.
On annual contracts, that you have any expectations here?
Yeah.
There are a number of projects that are ramping up.
No, great question. Initially, in 2018 when we did an IPO, we had an idea about biopharma. 2019, Aaron spent his effort on the science, building the data package to show that we could do it. 2020 was focused on commercialization to show that we could monetize our platform in biopharma. So far we've prioritized getting as many partners as possible. There is quantity has a quality of its own. That has been our goal. We had guided five to six paid contract and as of June, we had reported nine paid contract with six with milestones and our royalty. We're on track with our goals. In the future, I think we'll start to shift from prioritizing just a number more towards prioritizing value.
For instance, if someone came in with a big check saying we want exclusivity for a year or for this disease, I think we'll be interested in that. We will be more interested in actual economic value than just sheer numbers of projects.
Okay. Thanks, that's helpful. On competition front, if I could ask about there's a competitor antibody optimization platform, and since you talked about AbCellera, I'll ask about that. AbCellera helped get a COVID therapeutic, that's the Lilly's LY-CoV555 antibody, into the clinical trial in a very short period of time, and that too as a functional antibody. I think the timeline there from patient to lead to trial was fairly short. As you compare that to the Vanderbilt data that is looking promising but is not in clinical trials, I mean, wondering what are your expectations there? When can we potentially see that product into the trial? I think ultimately the question here is that getting into the trials and eventual success with the approval of drug will be your true validation of your platform.
Just trying to get a sense of what's your expectation on that or any other programs that could potentially see an approval in the sort of the near term or the next one to two years?
Thanks for the great question. We definitely understand that. When I send the sequence of validation, so as I said, we'd focus on science first, then we're signing partnership, and I totally agree that one of the next catalytic event inflection point in terms of validation of the platform is getting into the clinic. That getting into the clinic could happen from one of the partners that we've signed first. When we did the work on our COVID-19, we started very late. We started end of March when others started early in January. It was more of a marketing purpose to show that we also could make some really good antibodies. Our platform does not necessarily have an intrinsic advantage in a COVID-19 world, because COVID is not hard to drug. You can get antibodies other ways.
We do have the advantage of being very fast, and so that helps. The intent in doing our COVID work was more to validate the platform, which we did. The data that we got from COVID has been actually very useful to sign partners. It has been great for business, but we are not necessarily expecting an upside from that COVID work. However, that upside is possible. It is possible that someone comes to license our antibodies for therapeutics. It could be that someone come and licenses for diagnostic. We are talking to a number of parties, but we're not guided to it, and this should be considered an upside. As I said, the quality of the data has been very good to make sure that the funnel for signing partnership is strong.
Okay. Thanks. Maybe if I could ask the panelists, Dr. Mabry and Jürgen, Bill, and Carsten. As you look at the targets or antibodies that need optimization, and you're looking at the partners and evaluating partners, could you walk us through the evaluation process in terms of antibody discovery and optimization, which is what a number of these companies are offering in the marketplace, and Twist is leading with its scale in that platform with being able to deliver CDR repertoire that is unmatched in the space, versus something that is maybe in vivo versus something that is functional or maybe, let's say, a company that is doing great at yeast display? When you look at these different technologies and partners out there, how do you evaluate?
Do you expect to start with a number of them at first and then sort of whittle down to a select as you're seeing data emerge from these platforms? Just walk us through your sort of broad thinking there. Maybe start with Dr. Mabry first.
Sure. Well, I'll try to capture that in a somewhat condensed response so we can move on. That is a very good question, and I think when it comes to targets, there are different idiosyncrasies, whether this is a multi-spanner that is difficult to express on recombinant cells or if this is a soluble cytokine. The nature of these targets actually are very different, and it requires different technologies to approach them. Now, going back to what I said before, when it comes to optimization, certainly library generation is something that is very important regardless of what system that you use. If you're looking at optimizing for cross-reactivity, affinity, biophysical properties, I think that Twist has a very good platform for generating diversities, and that can go into any system. This could go into the phage system, it could go into access that we have to yeast libraries.
It could go into a cell-free display. Again, our model is likely going to be different than the other panelists, just due to the number of projects and the scope and the scale of our work to support these therapeutic areas. We need access to all of these technologies in order to maintain a focus that is tailored for each one of these projects. When it comes to how we pick and choose technologies, it's really based on the target.
Anything from Bill or Jürgen?
Yeah, I can go with that. I think the same applies to us when it comes to target and what technology to apply. We have another dimension on that we are working in different species, and not only one different species, but several. We're talking dogs and cats, but possibly more other species as well. We have to find the technology or had to find a technology that is adaptable to that and still deliver the same quality as you would expect for human medicine so that we get to that new standard we want to set. The Twist platform is uniquely positioned, I think, to do that.
What Aaron and his team has demonstrated really impressively how not only the human repertoire but also a feline or canine repertoire, and I'm sure other repertoires as well can be rapidly built to deliver really a fantastic output. Certainly, for the optimization, we have seen really fantastic results. For us, that is really the key point of this technology, and I hand over to Bill for a second, maybe he has something to add to that.
I think you captured it quite well, Jürgen. In the interest of time, I'll stop there.
Okay, thanks.
Carsten, anything else you want to add?
I think Robert summarized it perfectly for us as well. We looked at the target, we believe that the diversity of different libraries, together with the perspective of optimizing any leads coming out of it using, again, different libraries, was the most promising approach for us.
All right. That's very helpful, guys. Thank you.
Thank you.
At this time, I'm showing no further questions from our phone line.
Thank you. I know we're out of time, but there's a few questions in the chat, so we will answer a few of them. Maybe we'll go a few minutes over. One question maybe for Jim. When does Biopharma revenue exceed the rest of the business?
That's a very good question. Thank you, Emily, for that question. Obviously, our business is growing very rapidly. Through the first nine months of this year, overall bookings for the company were about $75 million. Biopharma bookings were about $2.5 million. From a revenue point of view, the revenue for the first nine months is about $58 million. Biopharma is $1.1 million. I think from what you've heard from the analysts here or the panelists here, we're designed and working with some great partners. My view is that Biopharma is going to be a significant contributor to the economic outcome of the company. However, the other elements are going to grow just as fast. We're doubling our business. It's grown from $25 million- $54 million overall company.
My view is that Twist Biopharma is going to be a significant contributor as we scale this company to $200 million, then to $500 million, through the partnerships and the exciting technologies and diversity they're working on.
Thank you. A question for Aaron. If an antibody is successful, would Twist make commercial quantities too, or does this get made on a different platform?
Great question. Again, if an antibody is successful that we were working on internally, yeah, we'd have to work with a partner to help us with scaling it. The traditional way I admit scaling an antibody is typically in CHO cells to make a stable cell line. Again, we're of course also exploring other expression technologies to scale up and make antibodies as well.
Thank you very much. There are many more questions, but in the interest of time, we will draw to a conclusion. Thank you very much for all the question, all the engagements, and hopefully we'll be able to answer them in the future. To conclude, I think I have two more slides. Next slide, please. As you heard today, we have DNA libraries, which is content. We can do antibody discovery, antibody optimization, and high throughput production of antibodies that this is now being validated with partner. At Twist Bioscience we are also advancing some of our own Twist-sponsored development against seven targets that we have analyzed and deemed valuable. The last slide, as a reminder, we have built a platform for writing DNA on silicon. We're going after large growing markets. We always have a differentiated value proposition.
You've heard from three customers today how this is also true in Biopharma, where we have differentiation. We are building a portfolio of high-growth business with now validated business models. We have been able to deliver so far high revenue growth. As a company, we have a track record of execution and innovation, thanks to the grit and innovation and the dedication of the Twistors. We are very thankful for the support of our investors to help us get there. With that, we'll conclude this session. Thank you again to our four speakers. We very much appreciate the partnership, the business, but also you taking the time. I know it's been a lot of prep, and so we very much appreciate that. Thank you as well for those of you that joined on the phone and participated in the Q&A.
With that, looking forward to talk to you soon. Thank you.
The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation.