To “make biology programmable,” Latent Labs is developing AI foundation models. It also intends to collaborate with biotech and pharmaceutical firms to produce and enhance proteins.
Without initially comprehending the function of proteins in human biology, it is impossible to comprehend what DeepMind and its kind are doing. Everything in living cells, including hormones, enzymes, and antibodies, is powered by proteins. They consist of about 20 different amino acids that join to form strings that fold to form a three-dimensional structure, the shape of which dictates how the protein works.
But in the past, determining each protein’s form was a laborious and extremely slow process. With AlphaFold, DeepMind made a significant advance by combining machine learning with actual biological data to forecast the shapes of almost 200 million protein structures.
With this information, researchers can develop novel medications, better comprehend illnesses, and even make synthetic proteins for completely unimagined applications. Latent Labs steps in at this point to empower scientists to “computationally create” novel therapeutic compounds from the ground up.
Before co-leading the protein design team and establishing DeepMind’s wet lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London, Simon Kohl (shown above) began his career at DeepMind as a research scientist, working with the core AlphaFold2 team. Around this same period, DeepMind also gave rise to Isomorphic Labs, a sibling business dedicated to using DeepMind’s AI discoveries to revolutionize drug discovery.
Kohl was persuaded to go it alone with a smaller team that was exclusively focused on creating frontier (i.e., cutting-edge) models for protein design as a result of these discoveries. Kohl left DeepMind at the end of 2022 to establish Latent Labs, which he incorporated in London in the middle of 2023.
“I had a fantastic and impactful time [at DeepMind], and became convinced of the impact that generative modeling was going to have in biology and protein design in particular,” Kohl told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “At the same time, I saw that with the launch of Isomorphic Labs, and their plans based on AlphaFold2, that they were starting many things at once. I felt like the opportunity was really in going in a laser-focused way about protein design. Protein design, in itself, is such a vast field, and has so much unexplored white space that I thought a really nimble, focused outfit would be able to translate that impact.”
As a venture-backed firm, translating that influence meant hiring about 15 people, including a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, a senior engineer from Microsoft, and two staff from DeepMind. Today, Latent has two locations: one in London, where the magic of the frontier model is performed, and another in San Francisco, which has its own computational protein design team and wet lab.
Kohl also said
“This enables us to test our models in the real world and get the feedback that we need to understand whether our models are progressing the way we want,”.
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