Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A scientist who helped build DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning protein prediction programme has raised $50mn to launch a company to discover new drugs. Simon Kohl has founded Latent Labs to capitalise on his experience working on the AI-powered AlphaFold2 system, which solved an important problem for life sciences researchers by allowing the prediction of the 3D structure of proteins based on their chemical composition. Latent Labs, which has offices in London and San Francisco, will work with the pharmaceutical industry to design synthetic proteins, which could be used in drugs such as antibody treatments.Kohl said generative AI, which creates new content, had the potential to change how drugmakers operate by making biology “programmable”. “In a perfect world, the dream of purely computational drug discovery comes to life,” he described. “You tell me, this is the sort of disease you’re going after. Maybe there’s a target protein that you have in mind. And at a push of a button, we can generate candidates that meet all of the criteria you care about, which de-risks the steps that come after, shaves time off the process, and at the end of the day, will yield better drugs, faster.”Many other start-ups are also trying to create drugs using artificial intelligence and most plan to partner with pharmaceutical companies on any drugs they do discover.Latent Labs is pursuing a different model: it wants to be a service provider to pharmaceutical companies, providing a generative AI platform that they can use. Its aim is to work with drugmakers, many of which have built their own AI teams, to use the technology to cut short the long and expensive process of discovering and developing drugs. DeepMind has also spun out its own drug discovery company, Isomorphic Labs. Kohl said Isomorphic is following the more common business model of partnering with pharma companies, and is taking a broader approach beyond just proteins, including looking for the small molecules that form the basis of many drugs. The fundraising was co-led by Radical Ventures, which specialises in AI software companies, and European healthcare venture firm 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. Aaron Rosenberg, a partner at Radical Ventures who also used to work at DeepMind, said Latent Labs had hired an “all star” team from companies including Microsoft, Google, and Altos Labs, a biotech focused on longevity. He expects that the company’s model, which is already “amazingly capable” will improve dramatically. “This is a whole new world of computational biology,” he said.
