A significant step forward in protein design from Generate Biomedicines, Massachusetts, has developed an AI that can generate feasible protein structures and predict the potential functionality of the proteins generated.
In a paper, “Illuminating protein space with a programmable generative model,” published in Nature, the team introduces Chroma, a versatile AI capable of producing diverse proteins with specified properties.
Proteins are the amino acid compounds that make up all living things, and these proteins carry out the majority of functions that make life possible. Almost all pharmaceutical drugs target proteins in the body, and many pharmaceuticals are themselves proteins or manufactured using proteins.
With proteins at the core of human health and the pharmaceutical response to disease, being able to create novel proteins to enact specific properties could unlock a cascade of new drug targets. By having a more flexible control over proteins, existing drugs could be made safer and currently untreatable diseases could gain access to previously un-druggable targets.
Chroma’s uniqueness lies in its programmability, allowing users to specify a wide array of properties, from inter-residue distances to semantic specifications through classifiers.
2023-11-21 03:41:02
Post from phys.org
