Specially designed for undergo rapid experimentation at scale, Latent Labs’ latentX – a web-based AI model to streamline protein design. Latent Labs has officially come out with LatentX. Just six months after coming out of stealth mode, the company hit a major milestone with its new release. They went on to receive $50 million in investments to fund their ideas of innovation. The goal of the model is to give researchers and other organizations the power to easily navigate the difficult and unpredictable journey of programming biology.
Founded by a former DeepMind employee, Latent Labs hopes to make the world’s most advanced biotechnological tools accessible to everyone. Beyond its own use, the company licenses its AI model to outside organizations. This strategy helps open up advanced biological programming to a more diverse audience. LatentX is free to use right now, but Latent Labs intends to add paid features and capabilities down the road.
Marina Kohl, one of the speakers from Latent Labs, reminded the audience about creating accessible and affordable AI tools in the biotech industry. She stated, “Not every company is in a position to build their own AI models, to have their own AI infrastructure, and to have their own AI teams.” This reinforces the company’s dedication to offering resources that smaller firms can use to compete and succeed against organizations of all sizes.
Latent Labs joins a developing field of recent AI-driven startups that are bringing and using AI to drug discovery and protein design. Other players making some waves in this space include Chai Discovery and EvolutionaryScale. The company has been in the news lately with its recent funding victory of $142 million. Tech behemoths Amazon and Nvidia supported this remarkable investment to enhance its protein-producing AI prowess.
Latent Labs does this in a very different way than a company like Isomorphic Labs. To fuel its proprietary drug development work, recently Isomorphic Labs raised $600M from Thrive. Similarly, Xaira launched with an impressive $1 billion investment, asserting its readiness to begin drug development using its AI platform. Recursion is another big AI player in the game pushing to use artificial intelligence to change drug discovery for the better.
Kohl pointed out the shortcomings of current models such as AlphaFold. He cautioned that AlphaFold largely focuses on predicting a protein’s structure. She explained, “Alpha fold is a machine learning model for protein structure prediction. So it enables you to visualize proteins that already exist, but it doesn’t allow you to create new proteins yourself. This important difference is what makes LatentX innovative and special. That’s the magic of ProteiXel; it puts the power to think visually and imagine new proteins in users’ hands.”
