Proteinea's Pioneering Approach to AI-Designed Therapeutics

While ChatGPT and algorithmically-generated images have taken the content world by storm, artificial intelligence (AI) has also been making significant strides in the life sciences arena. The application of cutting-edge AI techniques to biology has unleashed a transformative wave across healthcare research, promising a new paradigm of therapeutic innovations. Since the emergence of modern biotechnology in the late 1970s, the development of new medicines has largely followed a semi-random 'discovery' process, where scientists unravel biological mysteries through one painstaking experiment at a time. The advent of methods enabling the digitization of biological data, coupled with AI's unparalleled ability to process and interpret vast datasets, is today revolutionizing biotech. This evolution enables a shift to a knowledge-guided and design-based paradigm.

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Shorooq Partners, traditionally known for investments in fintech, software, and platforms, is actively championing this transformation by supporting innovative ventures in the biotech sector. Our commitment to innovation transcends sectoral boundaries and binary outcomes, driven by a vision to support technologies with the potential to significantly impact healthcare outcomes in society. It's within this context that we proudly present Proteinea, a key biotech venture in our portfolio that leverages AI to forge new frontiers in healthcare solutions.

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AI and The Future of Drug Development: Historically, developing new therapeutic medicines has been a costly and lengthy process, characterized by a high failure rate. On average, bringing a drug to market costs over $2 billion and spans a decade. For years, researchers have sought to streamline this process through the computational design of new, effective medicinal molecules—a quest considered the holy grail of pharmaceutical research. In 2020, a breakthrough by DeepMind's AI models in solving the "protein folding problem," a challenge that has puzzled biologists for half a century, underscored AI's potential in tackling complex biological issues. This pivotal advancement not only demonstrated AI's value in biological research but also set the stage for a wave of AI-driven innovations aimed at disease understanding and drug design. Despite these advances, numerous challenges persist, underscoring that the full promise of AI in life sciences research remains largely untapped.

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Importance of Proteins: Proteins are complex molecules that serve as building blocks for all biology and life; they help us digest food, fight infections, and treat diseases, among many other applications. With the global market for protein-based therapeutics exceeding $400 billion and continuing to rise, the importance of proteins in medicine cannot be overstated. Each protein, comprised of a chain of amino acids, adopts a unique, often complex, three-dimensional structure through folding. This intricate conformation dictates its function, making the deciphering of protein structures essential for understanding biological mechanisms underlying diseases and their treatments. The major hurdle in this endeavor is the vast array of potential shapes and functions proteins can assume. As such, learning the language of biology begins with mastering the correlation between protein structure and function.

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Innovations at Proteinea: At the core of Proteinea’s mission is the strategic utilization of AI to enhance the design of protein-based biotherapeutics. Their approach is multi-pronged, integrating advanced deep-learning models with high-throughput experimental platforms, which collectively promise to reshape the development process and therapeutic impact of medicines:  

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1)     New Protein Design and Engineering: Proteinea employs AI to engineer proteins with specific physical and therapeutic properties. This process, which leverages state-of-the-art physics-based tools and predictive models to determine protein structures and functions, streamlines the journey from conceptual design to practical application, facilitating the creation of new proteins that can act as drugs, vaccines, or diagnostic tools.

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2)     Ankh, A Breakthrough in Protein Transformers: An innovative highlight in Proteinea’s arsenal is Ankh, the first general-purpose Protein Language Model (PLM) trained on Google's TPU v4 technology. Ankh serves a role similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT but for proteins, adept at deciphering the unspoken syntax and grammar of protein sequences, structures, and functions. Ankh surpasses the performance of other PLMs, including those from MetaAI (formerly Facebook), by more effectively predicting essential protein characteristics and with drastically less computational demand. This tool exemplifies the power of AI in pushing the boundaries of protein engineering, offering a more rapid and cost-effective route to drug design and development.

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3)     Smart Experimental Throughput: Beyond computational models, Proteinea integrates AI with smart lab technologies to accelerate the experimental validation of AI-predicted proteins. This process ensures that theoretical models translate into practical therapeutic solutions by iteratively feeding back real-world data into their AI systems. By maximizing the power of computational tools Proteinea is thus able to reduce the need for extensive experimental iterations and take a data-efficient strategy to enhance the precision and efficacy of new protein designs, hastening the transition from laboratory to patients.

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Proteinea’s Impact on Life Sciences: The implications of Proteinea's work in biotechnology extend far beyond mere innovations; they represent a leap towards a future where medicines are more precise, effective, and personalized. Proteinea’s capabilities are built on ground-truth knowledge foundations, meaning they can be applied to a huge range of opportunities in the therapeutic drug design space. Proteinea is currently focused on solving high-impact problems that are inaccessible to traditional approaches, including solutions to lower the cost of drug manufacturing, the design of drugs that are safer and more convenient for patients, and medicines that achieve breakthrough therapeutic effects to treat and hopefully cure disease.  

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Shorooq Partners' Vision: Our recent investment in Proteinea underscores our commitment to nurturing innovations with profound societal benefits, reflecting our belief in AI's transformative power across sectors with high human impact. Proteinea’s innovative use of AI in protein engineering and biotherapeutics design stands as a beacon of the advancements we aim to foster. This partnership is rooted in our forward-looking approach to transition healthcare from a reactive to a proactive and personalized approach.

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We are thrilled to collaborate with Proteinea’s exceptional team, including the founding members Mahmoud Eljendy, Abdulaziz Elgammal, Mohamed El Kerdawy, and Ahmed Marouf, to forge a healthier, more promising tomorrow. Their ongoing growth and success serve as a powerful testament to the vast potential of AI that is just beginning to unfold.

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For more insights into Proteinea's groundbreaking work in AI-driven healthcare innovation, we invite you to visit their website at Proteinea.com.

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