Twist Bioscience leverages OCI and AI to advance protein initiatives
OCI’s deep engineering engagements accelerate the synthetic biology and genomics company’s pursuits in biologics drug discovery and DNA data storage.
“Oracle's engineering teams overdelivered to our expectations. It was clear from the start that OCI’s value extends far beyond the infrastructure. We were extremely impressed by Oracle’s ability to quickly help us deploy and subsequently scale up our pipeline.”
Business challenges
Within the life sciences community, proteins are known as the building blocks of life. When proteins malfunction in the body, bad things may happen. Consequently, understanding protein structure from DNA is one of the greatest challenges faced in drug discovery today.
Twist Bioscience is a leading global synthetic biology and genomics company powering research to improve the lives of millions of people. The company has developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform that pioneers a new method of manufacturing synthetic DNA by “writing” DNA on a silicon chip.
Twist manufactures a broad range of synthetic DNA-based products, including synthetic genes, tools for next-generation sequencing (NGS) preparation, and antibody libraries for drug discovery and optimization. In addition, Twist is also pursuing longer-term opportunities to store digital data in DNA and biologics drug discovery.
To meet these goals, Twist needed a cloud platform provider that would closely collaborate with the company from an engineering perspective and offer high-performing GPU instances and extensive cloud data storage and processing capabilities globally.
The willingness of Oracle’s engineering team to deeply engage with Twist Bioscience to understand the unique challenges was a major factor in choosing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Why Twist Bioscience chose Oracle
Twist selected OCI because Oracle’s Healthcare and Life Sciences AI/ML engineering team was able to quickly deploy, optimize, and scale a pipeline for predicting protein structures. Oracle was able to help Twist rapidly operationalize AlphaFold2, ParaFold, and ESMFold, which are artificial intelligence (AI) models developed to perform predictions of protein structures.
Oracle’s aggressive expansion of its cloud regions was also a factor in Twist’s decision. With 40 regions available today and many more to come, Twist was confident that Oracle could support future initiatives with local data storage requirements.
With performant NVIDIA GPUs running on bare metal and OCI, Twist experiences significant performance improvements across its ParaFold and ESMFold AI models.
Results
The company’s AI models now run much more efficiently on OCI Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Instances, specifically leveraging the cost-effective NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs.
With OCI’s flexible commercial models, Twist quickly and cost effectively went from evaluating 3D models using AlphaFold2, ParaFold, and ESMFold, to predicting thousands of 3D models of protein structures per day. On OCI, ParaFold yielded a 40% improvement compared to AlphaFold2. Oracle’s HPC team was subsequently able to deliver an optimized deployment of ParaFold that yielded an additional 36% reduction in time to complete each sequence and, consequently, cost-per-sequence savings. With the recent release of ESMFold, Oracle’s engineering team helped Twist quickly deploy this as well. Prediction speeds improved by an additional 82%.
Up next for Twist Bioscience is using OCI to accelerate adoption of next-generation archive storage technology using DNA as a medium. Within OCI, Twist demonstrated that digital files can be uploaded to OCI Object Storage and queued in Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing to be encoded using Twist’s proprietary technology running on Oracle Linux and subsequently written to DNA using Twist’s DNA synthesis platform.
Today, Twist is writing data in megabytes, but expects future rack systems to ultimately scale up to exabyte-class storage at the data center rack level. This seamless collaboration of technologies, supported by Oracle’s unmatched expansion of regional cloud data centers, highlights the potential for Twist to offer unprecedented data storage capabilities for archives, including scientific and cultural archives as well as other data.
About the customer
Founded in 2013, Twist Bioscience is a public biotechnology company based in South San Francisco that manufactures synthetic DNA and DNA products for customers in a wide range of industries. The company developed a disruptive DNA synthesis platform to industrialize the engineering of biology.