TWB teams up with innovative start-ups to enhance its service offering

TWB has launched “the integrated offerings” to provide industrial companies with the best chances of success for their R&D project. Developed together with the companies in its consortium, these services are available to industrial companies, academics and TWB partners. By integrating their solution into TWB itself, the start-ups receive direct commercial feedback while enjoying access to the dynamic ecosystem of TWB. For its part, as an expert in R&D project management in the industrial biotechnology field TWB is establishing itself as a single port of call for the acceleration of process development by expanding its service catalogue. The two integrated offerings set up by TWB so far have already received a warm welcome from its clients.

The first offering was developed together with ALTAR, a start-up that delivers an innovative process to enhance microorganisms via natural selection. Installed at the core of the TWB Bioprocesses platform, the start-up’s technology supports the paradigm shift it wants to bring about: adapt microorganisms to the requirements of industrial companies rather than adapt the industrial process to the characteristics of the microorganisms. This powerful, fully automated tool can be used to conduct experiments via continuous culture to provide reliable, replicable solutions on an industrial scale. The company’s solution opens the door to developing properties of interest in microorganisms and addressing the challenges facing a great many markets, particularly those that require non-GM strains.

“The partnership with TWB came together quickly and naturally as our solution complements the services already proposed on its platform. In market terms, our technology responds to the growing need of industrial companies to enhance microorganisms without creating GMOs. For us, this integrated offering gives us the opportunity to work on projects we could not otherwise have accessed directly,” said Simon Trancart, CEO of ALTAR.

The technological solution of ALTAR is perfectly in step with the commitments of a large number of multinationals to develop sustainable alternatives and is therefore increasingly popular. In response to growing demand, TWB plans to double its fleet of screening units in the coming months. TWB and ALTAR are also planning to work together to develop other services using the ALTAR systems and the experience and expertise of TWB.

TWB joined forces with the start-up iMEAN in late 2020 to set up a second integrated offering. iMEAN has designed a technology that can produce very high-quality mathematical representations of living organisms. These can be used to generate predictions in terms of metabolic engineering and drastically reduce research time and costs by targeting the sticking points that are delaying scale-up.

With this integrated offering, iMEAN and TWB can, for example, collaborate on projects following the Design-Build-Test-Learn (DBTL) cycle. TWB asks iMEAN to model living organisms and design synthetic organisms (Design). TWB produces the desired organisms via its technology platform (Build) and tests them under laboratory conditions (Test). Further to these experiments, iMEAN can use the data generated to understand the sticking points within the cells and resolve them (Learn).

This integrated offering is a perfect example of the existing alliance between iMEAN and TWB: iMEAN benefits from the lab-based expertise and clout of TWB to strengthen its models, while TWB draws on the solution to save time and reduce its engineering costs. The partners want to continue working together by developing innovative solutions that can provide added value for their respective clients in the near future.

“Our partnership with TWB gives us access to a flourishing ecosystem and the opportunity to take part in projects developed by TWB while contributing high added value. The synergy between our expertise is a real asset as it enables us to model, design and test sophisticated industrial organisms on one single platform, and therefore streamline experiments and reduce costs,” said Rémi Peyraud, CEO of iMEAN.

TWB is keen to continue deploying integrated offerings in the coming years to keep improving its services and propose a complementary offering that meets the requirements of its clients. TWB is always on the lookout for innovative companies with which to form partnerships.