IPD Executive Director Lynda Stuart, MD, PhD, recently spoke at the Life Science Innovation Northwest conference. She was joined by panelist from Absci, Bristol Myers Squibb, Microsoft, NVIDIA.
From GeekWire:
“The Pacific Northwest has the compute, it has the biotech, but it also has a kind of culture of collaboration and sharing that is not present in certain other parts of the country,” said Lynda Stuart, executive director of the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) at the University of Washington.
“A regional hub is a very natural thing to emerge,” said Portland, Ore.-based Jonathan Cohen, vice president of applied research at NVIDIA, which is investing heavily in AI-mediated drug design.
The IPD is at the center of this hub. The IPD generates open-source AI tools to craft protein-based therapeutics, vaccines, materials and biosensors, and its Seattle-area spinouts and affiliated companies interact with each other and partner with larger biopharma companies.
In September, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft released an open-source model to generate proteins, and other big tech companies are also betting on the field.
One major aim is to not only discover new therapeutic proteins but to shorten their clinical development through “quality by design,” said Stuart. Researchers can now assess proteins for traits such as ease of manufacture or unwanted cross-reactivity to other molecules, she said.
Read the full story by Charlotte Schubert at geekwire.com
