🗞️ Featured paper

Google’s DeepMind has released another seminal paper in the realm of biology, following their groundbreaking work with AlphaFold. In this latest venture, they aim to predict the effects of every single amino acid substitution within the human proteome.

To address the myriad challenges posed by the inherently noisy, unbalanced, and sparsely labeled genetic data, they employed a multifaceted approach. This included: (i) using an unsupervised large language model (LLM) derived from protein sequences; (ii) incorporating structural context based on AlphaFold2; and (iii) fine-tuning the model with weak labels derived from population frequency data.

The paper was published on Science, and they open-sourced the workflow at GitHub (but no trained weights).

For reference, a similar algorithm was published earlier on Nature Genetics by scientists from UCSF.

🤝 Featured Collaboration

Novo Nordisk, the Europe's most valuable company thanks to its 'miracle' weight loss drug Wegovy, and Valo Health, an AI-focused biotech startup founded by Flagship Pioneering, have sealed a groundbreaking deal to fast-track the discovery and development of cutting-edge cardiometabolic treatments. Harnessing the power of Valo’s AI-backed Opal Computational Platform™ and real-world patient datasets, this collaboration marks a significant stride in AI-enabled drug discovery.

As part of the deal, Valo stands to receive a whopping $60 million upfront, with the potential to earn up to an astonishing $2.7 billion in milestone payments!

Read more on the press release.

 👩‍💻 Featured Jobs

Johnson & Johnson is tapping into AI's immense potential, from fast-tracking drug discoveries to enhancing clinical trial recruitment (Read more).

With the recent renaming of its pharmaceutical segment from "Janssen" to "Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine," coupled with a heightened investment in data science and AI, Johnson & Johnson is unveiling many job opportunities. Notably, they have dedicated a career page specifically for data science and AI related roles. Discover more on their official careers website.