After evaluating the technology landscape, it became clear that the Berkeley Lights Platform is uniquely positioned to enable Bayer Crop Science to deliver on our commitment for world-class innovation and standards in sustainability for farmers, consumers and the environment. Our agreement with Berkeley Lights to develop and perform high-throughput functional screening workflows will enable us to accelerate and expand our trait discovery program.

We are very pleased with the scientific progress using Berkeley Lights’ platform, which moves us towards highly scalable, cost-effective processes that leverage Thermo Fisher’s end-to-end solutions for viral vector development and manufacturing.

The impact of COVID-19 has put forward higher requirements for the public health and medical system construction. In this context, the rapid and efficient translation of scientific research achievements into clinical applications is of great value. Berkeley Lights’ Beacon optofluidic system will bring us very rapid and automated single cell screening solutions in the development of anti-infection drugs and anti-tumor therapies. The single-cell screening solution can further expand the arsenal of the SHAPHC in translational research and help us promote scientific research achievements to clinical applications more quickly by improving our research capabilities, expanding project quantities and accelerating translation progress.

The added efficiency and robustness of the Beacon CLD workflow is unparalleled and we look forward to continuing to work with the Berkeley Lights team to bring this exciting technology on board.

The Beacon platform is one of the few technologies we've seen that potentially offers a truly advanced solution to synthetic biology by making it possible to test engineered microbial strains in a fraction of the time and at unprecedented scales. This collaboration with Berkeley Lights is expected to not just increase our screening capacity for a high-value, commercial asset, but to also deliver high-producing strains at a fraction of the overall cost. This would help to support increased speed to market for commercial-scale products at reduced cost.

This collaboration between ChemPartner and BLI brings together leading technologies and expertise from both companies to offer innovative scientific solutions to the biopharmaceutical industry. We look forward to this exciting beginning to our collaboration with BLI as we continue with our mission to provide our clients with cutting edge science and technology.

We are committed to raising the height of our innovation by adopting new technologies that make drug discovery and development more efficient. The implementation of the platform from Berkeley Lights is in line with our ambition to drive a faster and more efficient path towards clinical development of lead candidates by increased investment in automation and digital capabilities.

We see potential in leveraging the Beacon platform to help accelerate and access greater diversity for our drug development processes. This program enables a thorough evaluation of multiple areas within our development process to further optimize plasma b-cell and gene editing workflows.

TPG has already developed a streamlined cell line generation platform and generated dozens of production clones for our customers. We are always working to integrate innovative technologies to optimize our workflow. We chose to work with Berkeley Lights because the Beacon platform cell line development program has the potential to generate high yield cell lines more efficiently for us with additional insights into clone stability and enhanced clonality.

Introducing BLI's automated cell line development workflow is part of our ongoing efforts to identify and integrate breakthrough technologies into our drug discovery and development process. The initial application will be to select clones based on optimal growth rate and monoclonal antibody secretion. By integrating BLI technology into our cell line selection and characterization work, we anticipate significant efficiencies and enhanced quality in our antibody discovery workflow.

Being an early adopter of BLI technology, we are excited to implement the next generation of technology with the Beacon to enhance our research activities. The ability to further automate and increase throughput allows us to apply the technology to more areas and increase our production.

Single-cell genomics is a very exciting emerging field which will likely have considerable impact in the clinic. The BLI technology uses a unique, automated system that allows us to scale rapidly our research to understand how the state of individual cells and cell types correlates with disease status, progression, and response to therapy. Exploiting this innovative technology, we will identify and develop precision diagnostics and therapies which we aim to translate into clinical practice.

With the Berkeley Lights Platform, we are able to determine the phenotypic and functional characteristics of cells in real time, isolate specific cells of interest, and link the genomic profiles of these same cells using downstream assays. Other platforms are limited by the need to measure each of these parameters in isolation, but the Beacon and Lightning systems provide a more comprehensive view and allows us to home in on the cells that are actually responding to cancer neoantigens. This will play a large part in developing cell-based therapies that work for our patients.

We’ve been able to screen more molecules per project and clones per lead, meaning we can engage with our discovery colleagues earlier.

We are getting clones at about 50-100% higher productivity than we were with our traditional system.

At ThermoFisher we are very excited about [Beacon] technology that has allowed us to really reduce our critical path timelines, streamline our process, and to rethink how CLD is done.

We've actually put this technology into practice in our antibody discovery work, and it takes about four months off the normal timeline. It's starting to feel like a pretty transformative tool

The ability to both multiplex and run sequential assays increases the screening resolution beyond what is possible in alternative single cell discovery platforms, making the Beacon in our opinion one of the most powerful high content screening tools in the industry.

The throughput of two Beacon systems, coupled with our genetic immunization technology, has increased the probability of campaign success by delivering 10-fold more lead candidates against difficult targets like GPCRs.

In less than 24 hours, using the Beacon single-cell system, GenScript ProBio completed immunized mice processing, immune cell isolation and enrichment, single cell sorting, on-chip binding and blocking screening, which usually takes three months using the traditional hybridoma antibody screening.

The Beacon system paired with ingenious protein chemistry, will facilitate a high-throughput approach to identifying highly potent and rare ‘needle-in-a-haystack’- antibodies that would be ideal biotherapy candidates that have been difficult or impossible to find with previously available technology.

The Berkeley Lights team has already had an incredible impact on pharma — including cell line development and antibody discovery — and we believe this partnership will bring about a step-change in the speed and scale at which we engineer biology for applications across a variety of industries. We hope to move not just Ginkgo initiatives forward, but the entire biotech sector.

Being able to visualize phenotypes and perform functional assays on thousands of individual cells simultaneously allows users to obtain results in a fraction of the time. Very promising technology for cancer research.