AI Turns Its Artistry to Creating Human Proteins.

Inspired by digital art generators like DALL-E, biologists are building artificial intelligences that can fight cancer, flu and Covid.

Scientists are adapting techniques underlying art-producing artificial intelligence technology like OpenAI's DALL-E to model new proteins for fighting disease and other applications. The University of Washington (UW)'s Nate Bennett described a protein-structuring approach that, similar to DALL-E, "does what you tell it to do. From a single prompt, it can generate an endless number of designs." Such systems allow researchers to provide rough blueprints for desired proteins, whose three-dimensional shapes are produced by a diffusion model. These protein candidates then go to a wet lab to see if they function as expected. Said UW's Jue Wang, "What's exciting isn't just that they are creative and explore unexpected possibilities, but that they are creative while satisfying certain design objectives or constraints."