This webinar, brought to you by Twist Bioscience, will be hosted live and available on-demand.
Thursday, June 11th, 2026
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM ET
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy results in high rates of remission in patients with blood cancers and can result in durable, lasting cures. AI-driven protein design has recently demonstrated the ability to design proteins that bind other proteins, bringing the promise of accelerated CAR T-cell therapy discovery and expansion of these remarkable results to more cancers.
In this webinar brought to you by Twist Bioscience, Clayton Kosonocky and Wesley A. Wierson will present Bits to Binders, a global competition where teams from 42 countries used diverse in silico protein design pipelines to engineer and submit 12,000 de novo antigen binders. Rather than simply testing binding, this competition aimed to directly validate in silico binders as functional CAR T cells in a primary human T cell screen, and team hit rates ranged from 0.6 to 38.4 percent. They validated the top-performing candidates as individual constructs across other T cell functional assays including proliferation, cytokine production, and tumor killing, and found that several designs were broadly functional. From this data, common design methodologies and factors correlated with DNA synthesis, expression, and target-specific T cell activation were identified, which nearly double the success rates when applied as a retrospective filter. They release the full dataset as an open resource, with practical recommendations to support more effective AI-driven binder design
Topics to be covered
- Design and evaluation of AI-generated antigen binders for CAR T applications
- High-throughput proliferation assays to screen binder functionality in primary T cells
- Identification of design features associated with T cell viability and CAR expression
- Methods correlated with the success of AI driven CAR T design workflows
.png "Clayton Kosonocky") | Clayton Kosonocky |
 | Wesley A. Wierson |
