Biomanufacturers producing protein biologics, including complex modalities, will have access to a full suite of custom cell line development and cell culture services to accelerate and optimize biologics production
April 29th, 2025 - Asimov, the synthetic biology company advancing the design and manufacture of therapeutics, is collaborating with Cytiva, a global life sciences leader, to provide customers with an integrated offering for optimized biologics production. The new offering will provide seamless access to Asimov’s CHO Edge cell line development platform, Cytiva's HyClone media and feed solutions, and Cytiva’s Fast Trak process development services. Together, these services and technologies enable the expression and development of protein biologics, including complex modalities, that hold the potential to significantly impact human health.
Alec Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Asimov, says: “Central to this collaboration is the extensive optimization of our CHO Edge System in Cytiva’s HyClone media and feed, enabling high titer across biologic formats. By integrating a robust cell line development capability into Cytiva’s established biomanufacturing technologies, we can enhance customers’ production efficiency and accelerate their development timelines for critical therapeutics.”
Ludovic Brellier, President, Hardware Solutions, Cytiva says: “We’re two innovative players coming together to provide the technologies and services our customers need to accelerate the development of advanced therapeutics. By combining Asimov’s integrated suite of cells, genetic tools, AI models, and software with our extensive process development services, customers will have a cohesive path from development to commercialization.”
Cell line development technology has improved substantially over the years, but the majority of complex biologics are still produced using relatively low-titer cell lines. Asimov’s CHO Edge System, which enables molecule-specific expression optimization, significantly reduces the risk of low titer cell lines and enables customers to routinely achieve 7-11 g/L clones across biologic modalities. The system leverages a GS knock-out CHO host, a hyperactive transposase, a library of genetic elements, and advanced computational tools to design and optimize the vector. When paired with Cytiva’s Fast Trak process development services and HyClone media and feed, the new offering provides customers with a full suite of solutions from cell line development; cell culture media optimization; analytical and stability testing; and scaling to GMP production.
Here’s more information on Asimov’s CHO Edge cell line development platform.
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Virtual Private Network (VPN): Users connect to the cluster, provide some credentials and are then able to access internal tools.
Single Sign-On: A tool like Kerberos allows you to use the same account across various components.
Home-grown user accounts: You implement an authentication system and users have a separate username/password for your computing infrastructure.
Asimov, the synthetic biology company building a full-stack platform to program living cells, announced today it has been awarded a contract as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Automating Scientific Knowledge Extraction (ASKE) opportunity.
Through ASKE, Asimov will work to develop a physics-based artificial intelligence (AI) design engine for biology. The goal of the initiative is to improve the reliability of programming complex cellular behaviors.
“To achieve truly predictive engineering of biology, we require dramatic advances in computer-aided design. Machine learning will be critical to bridge genome-scale experimental data with computational models that accurately capture the underlying biophysics. As genetically engineered systems grow in complexity, they become difficult for humans to design and understand. For simple genetic systems with only a couple of genes, synthetic biologists typically use high-throughput screening and basic optimization algorithms. But to engineer more complex applications in health, materials, and manufacturing, we need radically new algorithms to intelligently design the DNA and simulate cell behavior.”
Alec Nielsen, Phd, Asimov CEO
Over the past 50 years, DARPA has been a world leader in spurring innovation across the field of AI, including statistical-learning and rule-based approaches. We are proud to work with DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in AI-assisted genetic engineering.
Asimov’s founders previously built a hybrid genetic engineering and computer-aided design platform called Cello to program logic circuit behaviors in cells. The ASKE opportunity will seek to support an ambitious expansion in the types of biological behaviors that can be engineered. Asimov’s approach will leverage “multi-omics” cellular measurements, structured biological metadata, and novel AI architectures that combine deep learning, reinforcement learning, and mechanistic modeling. Over the past year, the company has ramped up hiring in experimental synthetic biology, machine learning, and data science to accelerate development of their genetic design platform.
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Headering 3
DARPA recently announced a multi-year investment of $2B into innovative artificial intelligence research called the AI Next campaign. A part of this wide-ranging AI strategy is DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Exploration program, which was developed to help expeditiously move pioneering AI research from idea to exploration in fewer than 90 days. DARPA’s ASKE opportunity is part of this program and is focused on developing AI technologies that can reason over rich models of complex systems.
“Over the past 50 years, DARPA has been a world leader in spurring innovation across the field of AI, including statistical-learning and rule-based approaches. We are proud to work with DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in AI-assisted genetic engineering.”
Alec Nielsen, PhD, Asimov CEO
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