Liberum Biotech and RosettaCommons put rapid protein designing to the test

Artificial intelligence has made protein designs abundant, showing great promise for the acceleration of scientific discoveries that can advance human health. But there’s a design validation bottleneck because of how costly and time-consuming it is to produce and verify the designs in the lab.

That’s where Liberum Biotech comes in. Its proprietary technology produces proteins at high yields outside of living cells at a fraction of the usual cost and time.

The rapidly growing biotech startup recently captured a unique opportunity to expand the adoption of their tech.

RosettaCommons, a global network of researchers that develop protein design software, and Liberum Biotech held a biology hackathon, one of the first in the world, enabling 25 scientists from major universities, research institutions and hospitals in the U.S. to verify the veracity of their protein designs.

“Newly developed algorithms help design enzymes and antibodies that can impact human health and industrial applications, but ultimately these designs need to be validated in the real world,” said Aidan Tinafar, CEO and co-founder of Liberum Biotech. “Our clients can design proteins and have them synthesized and tested in as little as eight days starting from their digital sequences.”

Commenting on the utility of Liberum Biotech’s services, David Nannemann of RosettaCommons said: “The feedback cycle between computational designs that aim to solve biological problems is often very slow which hinders rapid innovation. Technologies that facilitate rapid feedback to protein designers and engineers can therefore be quite enabling.”