At an old biscuit factory in South London, giant mixers and industrial ovens have been replaced by robotic arms, incubators, and DNA sequencing machines. James Field and his company LabGenius aren't making sweet treats; they're cooking up a revolutionary, AI-powered approach to engineering new medical antibodies. In nature, antibodies are the body's response to disease and serve as the immune system's front-line troops. They're strands of protein that are specially shaped to stick to foreign invaders so that they can be flushed from the system. Since the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies have been making synthetic antibodies to treat diseases like cancer, and to reduce the chance of transplanted organs being rejected. But designing these antibodies is a slow process for humans--protein designers must wade through the millions of potential combinations of amino acids to find the ones that will fold together in exactly the right way, and then test them all experimentally, tweaking some variables to improve some characteristics of the treatment while hoping that doesn't make it worse in other ways.

LabGenius is engaged in AI-driven scientific research that could only have happened at this moment in time, and the cause couldn't be more important. Today, the company is focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases, but the principles can be applied far more widely. Using a combination of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and laboratory automation, the London-based biotech company is developing next-generation antibody therapeutics. The technologies and techniques involved have only recently reached the level of maturity needed for this ambitious undertaking. So, when IPU systems halved the compute time needed to run crucial AI model training, LabGenius' researchers realised that they had found a new and important tool in the race to innovate.

AI-driven scientific research firm LabGenius is harnessing the power of Graphcore's IPUs (Intelligence Processing Units) to speed up its drug discovery efforts. LabGenius is currently focused on discovering new treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The firm combines AI, lab automation, and synthetic biology for its potentially life-saving work. Until now, the company has been using traditional GPUs for its workloads. LabGenius reports that switching to Graphcore's IPUs in cloud instances from Cirrascale Cloud Services enabled its training of models to be reduced from one month to around two weeks.

The AI-focussed venture capital firm Air Street Capital today announced the closing of a €14.6 million fund, targeting early-stage founders in Europe and the US who combine AI expertise with deep sector-specific knowledge. Led by Air Street Capital founder and general partner Nathan Benaich, the London-based fund represents a new way of investing in AI companies. Its partners are embedded in the AI community and apply technical expertise to spot new talent and to source viable AI applications. Before starting Air Street Capital, its founder Nathan Benaich launched RAAIS and London.AI, which connect AI practitioners from large companies, startups and academia. Benaich's prior investments include Mapillary (acquired by Facebook), Tractable, LabGenius, Thought Machine, Starship, Ravelin, PolyAI, Jukedeck (acquired by ByteDance), and Numerai.

London, UK 20 April 2020 – LabGenius Ltd ("LabGenius" or "the Company"), a biopharmaceutical company developing next-generation protein therapeutics using machine learning, today announces that it has appointed Dr Edwin Moses as Chairman of its Board of Directors. Edwin Moses was Chief Executive Officer of Ablynx NV until its agreed takeover by Sanofi for $4.8 billion in 2018. He was CEO of Ablynx for more than 12 years and built it from a small R&D-focused organisation into a 500-person commercial-ready business. The company developed a broad biologics pipeline including a wholly-owned product for a rare hematologic indication, which was approved for use in Europe in 2018 and the USA in 2019. While at Ablynx, Dr Moses led its Euronext Brussels listing, multiple successful private and public financings and its US NASDAQ listing in 2017 which raised $230M.

LabGenius, a London-based startup applying AI and "robotic automation" to protein drug discovery, has raised $10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Inovia Capital, Air Street Capital and existing investors. Also investing is Recursion Pharmaceuticals' founder and CEO Chris Gibson, as well as Inovia Capital General Partner Patrick Pichette, who was formerly Google's CFO. Lux Capital's Zavain Dar and Obvious Ventures' Nan Li will join the LabGenius board of directors. Notably, the U.K. company's early investors include Nathan Benaich, Torsten Reil, EF's Matt Clifford, and Philipp Moehring, to name just a few.