Absci achieves a breakthrough in AI drug creation

De novo antibodies are here. 

AI and synthetic biology are unlocking new opportunities to create de novo antibodies, which could potentially reduce the time it takes to get new drug candidates into the clinic by more than half, while also increasing their probability of success in the clinic.

Absci achieved a breakthrough in generative AI drug creation: We are the first to design and validate de novo therapeutic antibodies with zero-shot generative AI.

• What is zero-shot? A method that involves designing antibodies to bind to specific targets without using any training data of antibodies known to bind to those specific targets. 
• Why does it matter? Absci’s zero-shot model generates antibody designs that are unlike those found in existing antibody databases, including de novo versions of all three heavy chain CDRs (HCDR123), the antibody regions most critical to target binding.
• How effective is it? We validated against more than 100,000 antibodies and found our hit rate to be up to five to 30 times greater than biological baselines examined. This data demonstrates the effectiveness of Absci’s generative AI platform at generating de novo antibodies that bind to the target of interest.

Creating antibodies in silico with generative AI represents a major industry breakthrough on the path to fully de novo antibody design and our vision to deliver breakthrough therapeutics at the click of a button, for everyone.

Read the bioRxiv preprint manuscript here

Please note that the preprint manuscript has not undergone peer review, the findings are provisional, and the conclusions may change.