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The scientists who helped build Deep Mind’s Nobel Prize-winning protein prediction program raised $50 million to launch the company to discover new drugs.
Simon Kohl has established a latent lab to leverage his experience working with an AI-powered Alphafold2 system. This solved a key problem for life science researchers by enabling prediction of the 3D structure of proteins based on their chemical composition.
With offices in London and San Francisco, the Potential Lab works with the pharmaceutical industry to design synthetic proteins. Synthetic proteins can be used in drugs such as antibody therapy.
Cole said that the generation AI that creates new content could change how pharmaceutical companies behave by making biology “programmable.”
“In a perfect world, purely calculated dreams of drug discovery come to life,” he explained. “You tell me, this is the kind of disease you are looking for. Maybe there is a target protein you have in mind. And just press a button and you’re in the mood. You can generate candidates that meet all criteria to meet., faster.”
Many other startups are also trying to use artificial intelligence to create drugs, and most often plan to partner with pharmaceutical companies on the drugs they discover.
Potential labs are pursuing a different model. We want to be a service provider for pharmaceutical companies and provide a generic AI platform that we can use. Their goal is to work with pharmaceutical companies, many of which build their own AI teams and use technology to shorten and reduce long and expensive processes of drug discovery and development.
Deepmind also spun its own drug discovery company, Isomorphic Labs. Kohl said Isomorphic follows a more general business model of partnering with pharmaceutical companies and takes a broader approach beyond protein alone, including looking for small molecules that form the basis of many drugs .
The funding was co-led by Radical Ventures, a specialist in AI software companies and European healthcare venture Sofinnova Partners. Other investors include Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, and Aidan Gomez, one of the authors of the research paper that led to the creation of ChatGpt.
Radical Ventures partner Aaron Rosenberg said he also worked for Deepmind, but Latent Labs said he had hired “all-star” teams from companies including Microsoft, Google and Altos Labs.
He hopes that the company’s already “surprisingly capable” model will improve dramatically. “This is a whole new world of computational biology,” he said.
