With $50 million in cash, a recently created startup led by a former DeepMind scientist is coming out of stealth mode. Latent Labs plans to work with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to discover and improve proteins, and hopes to build basic AI models to transform biology into a programmable field.
Since proteins are necessary for everything in living cells, including enzymes and antibodies, and are made up of approximately 20 distinct amino acids that fold into a three-dimensional shape to determine their function, it is imperative to understand their role in biology. Determining protein structure has always been a laborious human procedure, but DeepMind's AlphaFold has made substantial progress in this area by using machine learning to predict the shapes of nearly 200 million protein structures. This discovery allows the development of new drugs and synthetic proteins as well as a better understanding of diseases.
Simon Kohl, a former DeepMind scientist who worked with AlphaFold2 and the protein design team, founded Latent Labs. Kohl started Latent Labs in London after helping create DeepMind's wet lab, and he eventually moved the company to San Francisco. The startup plans to create unique molecules programmatically to reduce its reliance on wet lab testing by switching to computational methods. Latent Labs focuses on improving early stages of R&D through collaborations with life sciences companies rather than creating its own pharmaceutical prospects.
Several investors contributed to the startup's $50 million fundraising, highlighting the potential to revolutionize drug development by merging biology and computer science, a field that is still in its infancy and presents many unexplored options.
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