[Edaily Reporter Kim Hyung-il ] AI-driven new drug development company #PROTEINA CO., LTD. announced on the 27th that it has partnered with Twist Bioscience, a company listed on the U.S. Nasdaq, to collaborate on the development of new AI-based antibody drugs.

Twist is a biotech company headquartered in California, USA, equipped with the synthesis, expression, and testing infrastructure necessary to translate protein and antibody sequences into actual drug candidates. It also provides large-scale experimental validation services to verify AI-designed compounds for its global partners.

The two companies plan to streamline the process of physically producing and validating AI-designed candidate molecules by combining Twist’s large-scale synthesis and expression capabilities with PROTEINA CO., LTD.’s experimental validation and data generation capabilities.

With recent advances in AI technology enabling the rapid design of new drug candidates, the ability to swiftly produce and validate large-scale AI-generated candidate libraries has become increasingly important. The process of expressing candidate molecules in live cells and acquiring experimental data remains a major bottleneck in drug discovery, requiring significant time and resources.

PROTEINA CO., LTD. has established a closed-loop “Lab-in-the-Loop” system in which candidate molecules designed by AI models are experimentally tested and validated at scale, and the resulting data is then reused to train the AI.

The company is also working to expand its data production capacity to turn the demand for large-scale experimental validation into a new revenue stream. It plans to increase its production capacity for antigen-antibody interaction data—currently at 40,000 per month—by 25 times to 1 million per month by 2028.

PROTEINA CO., LTD. has advanced its antibody design AI model and its large-scale experimental validation and data production platform through a 15 billion won government-funded project from the Ministry of Science and ICT in 2024 and a 47 billion won government-funded project from the Ministry of Health and Welfare in 2025. Based on these advancements, the company is currently engaged in joint development with numerous new drug development firms.

Yoon Tae-young, CEO of PROTEINA CO., LTD., stated, “As advancements in AI technology enable numerous companies to rapidly design candidate compounds, the key competitive advantage in AI-driven drug discovery now lies in how quickly these can be translated into actual compounds and validated on a large scale.” He added, “It is significant that we are combining Twist’s world-class DNA synthesis technology with PROTEINA CO., LTD.’s large-scale wet-lab experimental validation capabilities.”

He continued, “We will strive to define the specific form of our collaboration by the end of the year,” and added, “By combining the capabilities of both companies, we will increase the speed and efficiency of candidate compound validation and lead the global AI-driven new drug development market.”