About six months after coming out of stealth with $50 million in funding, Latent Labs has released a web-based AI model for programming biology. Latent Labs model has “achieved state-of-the-art on different metrics” when testing the proteins it developed in a physical lab, according to Latent Labs CEO and founder Simon Kohl, a scientist who previously co-led DeepMind’s AlphaFold’s protein design team. State-of-the-art, or SOTA, is a term often used in the AI field that represents the industry’s best performance to date on a specific task. “We have computational ways of assessing how good the designs are,” he told TechCrunch, adding that a high percentage of proteins the model creates will be viable when tested in the lab. The company’s foundational biology model, known as LatentX, enables academic institutions, biotech startups, and pharmaceutical companies to design novel proteins directly in their browser using natural language. LatentX goes beyond what’s found in nature, creating entirely new molecule designs like nanobodies and antibodies with precise atomic structures. This approach can help develop new therapeutics at much faster rate. This ability to design entirely new proteins is what distinguishes LatentX from the AlphaFold, according to Kohl.

Full report : Latent Labs launches web-based AI model to democratize protein design.