“We want to build tools that can make biology programmable,” says Alex Rives, the company’s chief scientist, who was part of Meta’s efforts to apply AI to biological data.
EvolutionaryScale’s AI tool, called ESM3, is what’s known as a protein language model. It was trained on more than 2.7 billion protein sequences and structures, as well as information about these proteins’ functions. The model can be used to create proteins to specifications provided by users, akin to the text spit out by chatbots such as ChatGPT.
“It’s going to be one of the AI models in biology that everybody’s paying attention to,” says Anthony Gitter, a computational biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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