The new startup, founded by former Google Deepmind scientists, is ending stealth with $50 million in funding.
The Latent Lab is building a basic AI model to “make biology programmable” and will partner with biotech and pharmaceutical companies to generate and optimize proteins.
It is impossible to understand what Deepmind and its likeness do without first understanding the role proteins play in human biology. Proteins drive everything in living cells, from enzymes and hormones to antibodies. They are made up of about 20 different amino acids, and are joined by strings that fold to create a 3D structure, whose shape determines the function of the protein.
However, understanding the shape of each protein has historically been a very slow and labor-intensive process. It was a major breakthrough Deepmind achieved with AlphaFold. This measured actual biological data and machine learning to predict the shape of approximately 200 million protein structures.
Armed with such data, scientists can better understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create synthetic proteins for whole new use cases. So, potential labs enter the fight with the ambition to allow researchers to “create” new therapeutic molecules from scratch.
Potential potential
Simon Kohl (above) started out as a research scientist at Deepmind, collaborated with the core Alphafold2 team before co-leading the protein design team and founded DeepMind’s wet lab at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Around this time, DeepMind created a sister company in the form of a qualitative laboratory. It focuses on applying DeepMind’s AI research to transform drug discovery.
This was a combination of these developments that convinced Cole that it was right to do it alone in a more learmer outfit that focused specifically on building frontier (i.e. cutting edge) models for protein design. So, with the tail end in 2022, Cole laid the foundation for a potential lab and incorporated the business into London in mid-2023.
“I had a fantastic and impactful time (at deepmind), and I was particularly convinced of the impact that production modeling has on biology and protein design,” Cole told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “At the same time, we saw the launch of the isomorphic lab and their plans based on Alphafold2 were starting a lot at once. This opportunity really went to a laser-focused way of protein design. I felt that it was. The protein design itself is a very vast field, and there are so many unexplored white spaces that I think that a truly agile and focused outfit can translate the impact. It was there.”
It employed around 15 employees to translate the impact as a venture-backed startup. Two of them were senior engineers at Microsoft and received their PhD from Cambridge University. Today, Latent personnel are split into two sites. One is in London, with frontier model magic occurring, and the other is in San Francisco, with its own wet lab and computational protein design team.
“This allows us to test our models in the real world and get the feedback we need to understand if the models are going the way we want them to,” Cole said.
Wet Labs are on a very close agenda in terms of examining Latent’s technology predictions, but the ultimate goal is to deny the need for wet Labs.
“Our mission is to make biology programmable, and we actually bring biology into the field of computation, where our reliance on biological wet lab experiments decreases over time. “Cole said.
This highlights one of the key benefits of “making biology programmable.” It now reverses the drug discovery process that relies on countless experiments and iterations that could take years.
“This allows us to really create custom molecules without resorting to wet labs. At least that’s the vision,” Cole continued. “Imagine a world where someone is hypothesizing about drug targets chasing a particular disease. Our model uses a ‘push button’ method to create a protein drug with all the desired baked properties. You can make it. . ”
Biology Business
When it comes to business models, potential labs do not consider themselves “asset-centric.” This means that we will not develop our own treatment candidates within the company. Instead, we want to work with third-party partners to speed up the previous R&D stage and reduce risk.
“Our biggest impact as a company is enabling other biopharma, biotechnology and life science companies.
The company’s $50 million cash injection includes a previously unannounced $10 million seed tranche and a radical venture jointly jointly with $40 million fresh Series A Round A Round It’s here.
Another co-lead investor is Sofinnova Partners, a French VC company with a long track record in the life sciences space. Other participants in the round include Flying Fish, Isomer, 8VC, Kindred Capital, Pillar VC and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean, Core founder Aidan Gomez, and Eleven Love founder Matistanishevski. includes famous angels such as.
Cash chunks, including new machine learning employment wages, will be directed towards pay, but will require a substantial amount of money to cover the infrastructure.
“Computing is a huge cost for us too. We think it’s fair to say. I think it requires a lot of GPU calculations,” Cole said. “This funding has now doubled everything. We continue to scale our models, continue to scale our teams, start building bandwidth and capabilities, build these partnerships and the commercial traction we are looking for now. I’m starting to do it.”
Aside from Deepmind, there are several venture-backed startups and scale-ups, such as Cradle and Bioptimus, who want to steer the world of computation and biology more closely. Cole thinks we are still early enough on his part.
“There are very interesting seeds planted (for example) with alphafolds and other early generative models from other groups,” Cole said. “But this area hasn’t converged in terms of what the best model approach is, or which business models work here. I think they have the ability to innovate really.”