Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Biohub
Published in Diseases!, Drugs development & discovery, Organisations.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Biohub just released new Evolutionary Scale Models, creating an engine to map, predict, and design proteins — with the open system showing results against cancer and immune disease targets. The details: -The highlight is ESMFold2, a model built on a protein language model (ESMC) trained on 2.8B sequences to predict protein structure and design proteins. -ESMFold2 claims SOTA on structure prediction, for both protein-protein interactions and for antibody-antigen prediction, and outperforms AlphaFold. -It is already starting to show results in the lab, designing binders against five cancer and immune targets with hit rates of 36–88%. -Its final component, ESM Atlas, gives a map of 6.8B protein sequences and 1.1B predicted structures, surfacing novel evolutionary connections. Why it matters: With a $500M Virtual Biology Initiative and a SOTA, open-source stack of tools to accelerate protein discovery, Biohub is putting the infra of drug discovery into the hands of researchers everywhere. Between this and the work at Isomorphic Labs, we are inching closer to Hassabis’ vision of AI ending all disease.
