Functional luciferase design with deep learning

Written in late Mar 2023, a quick review of de-novo enzyme design with deep learning from David Baker’s group. Christian Dallago and Kevin Yang wrote a fantastic Nature News and Views piece a couple months later, describing the technique with some more depth.

A deep-learning-based “family-wide hallucination” approach generates idealized protein structures for designing artificial luciferases with high selectivity and thermostability, enabling the creation of highly active and specific biocatalysts with broad biomedical applications.

De novo enzyme design has been a grand challenge in biology, as it seeks to create tailor-made enzymes that overcome the limitations... » Continue reading

Anti-TechBio

Cowritten with my friend Dennis Gong, who’s currently a Harvard-MIT PhD Student. Cross posted on Dennis’s site here.

The struggles of public biotech markets have led to sector wide reflection. Specifically, there has been a reckoning of TechBio businesses, such as Recursion, Ginkgo, Zymergen, and others. The first TechBio investments made in the mid 2010s are amongst the biggest losers in today’s public markets. Since 2010, TechBio businesses represent 5 of the 10 worst performing IPOs while accounting for just 5% of market entrants. Our view is that this collapse of vision has roots in naive... » Continue reading