Biotech Labs Bank on Generative AI to Design New Protein Structures

OpenAI's DALL.E 2 has been making it big with text-to-image models that easily generate pictures from textual descriptions. Earlier this week, two biotech labs--Generate Biomedicines and David Baker's Group--relied on generative AI, particularly diffusion models, to come up with new protein structures and, eventually, better drugs. Boston-based therapeutics company Generate Biomedicines announced a programme called Chroma which, according to the company, is the "DALL-E 2 of biology". Similarly, biologist David Baker's team from the University of Washington has also come up with RoseTTAFoldDiffusion. The model can build accurate designs for new proteins that can be brought to life in the lab.