Computer Vision News Computer Vision News 8 Nathan Frey and the team at Prescient Design in Genentech are pushing the boundaries of drug discovery by applying generative modeling techniques, commonly associated with image generation, to create surprising new proteins and discover antibodies and other molecules to cure disease. However, as these are complex molecules critical for various biological functions, how can the validity of these protein designs be verified? “We have the major advantage that everything we design can be tested in the laboratory,” Nathan explains. “We work with our experimental colleagues and look at sequences together. They tell us if we’ve done something catastrophically wrong, if there’s something we haven’t thought of or been aware of, or if the human body or immune system would never do this. They teach us those kinds of things, and then we can teach the model and test them.” Nathan Frey is a Principal Machine Learning Scientist and Group Leader at Prescient Design, Genentech. He speaks to us fresh from winning an Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR 2024 for his pioneering work on generative modeling for drug discovery. Protein Discovery with Discrete Walk-Jump Sampling Outstanding Paper Winner! “We have the major advantage that everything we design can be tested in the laboratory!” ICLR Outstanding Paper
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