Absci achieves a breakthrough in AI drug creation

De novo antibodies are here. 

The ability to create new therapeutic antibodies in silico 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. AI and synthetic biology are unlocking new opportunities to create such De novo antibodies — antibodies that bind to specific targets without using any training data of antibodies known to bind to those specific targets.

Absci has announced 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 generated antibody designs that were unlike those found in existing antibody databases.

• Did it work? Yes! The AI-designed antibodies generated directly from our models were tested and validated in the wet lab — the step of optimizing the antibody design in the laboratory was completely eliminated!

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

In related work, Absci recently showed its ability to simultaneously optimize multiple parameters important to drug developability including binding affinity and naturalness score, a measure associated with drug developability and immunogenicity. More details on that work can be found here.

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