Protein programmers get a helping hand from Cradle's generative AI

Proteins are the molecules that get work done in nature, and there's a whole industry emerging around successfully modifying and manufacturing them for various uses. But doing so is time consuming and haphazard; Cradle aims to change that with an AI-powered tool that tells scientists what new structures and sequences will make a protein do what they want it to. The company emerged from stealth today with a substantial seed round. AI and proteins have been in the news lately, but largely because of the efforts of research outfits like DeepMind and Baker Lab. Their machine learning models take in easily collected RNA sequence data and predict the structure a protein will take -- a step that used to take weeks and expensive special equipment.