Important Takeaways:
- AI is used to compose music, suggests recipes and make investment decisions, but a company has designed a system that can edit human genes.
- California-based Profluent Bio developed a system capable of creating a range of bespoke cures for disease by developing molecules that have never existed in nature.
- com spoke to Ali Madani, CEO of Profluent Bio, who said the AI-made gene editors have been tested in human cells, which demonstrated high levels of functionality while not editing unintended sites in the DNA.
- The AI was trained on a database of 5.1 million CRISPR-associated (Cas) proteins, allowing it to create potential molecules that could be used in gene editing.
- The system then narrowed down the results to four million sequences, allowing it to identify the gene editor the team named OpenCRISPR-1.
- Experiments showed OpenCRISPR-1 performed as well as Cas proteins, but it also reduced the impact on off-target sites by 95 percent.
- AI was at the heart of this achievement. We trained large language models (LLMs) on massive scale evolutionary sequences and biological context,’ Madani said.
- ‘Our vision is to move biology from being constrained by what can be achieved in nature to being able to use AI to design new medicines precisely according to our needs.’
- The company believes that AI can work as an ‘interpreter to decode the language of life.’
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