Virtually everyone today is aware of the mRNA vaccine for COVID, which saved many lives and earned the Nobel Prize for Drs. Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko. The vaccine consisted not only of mRNA that coded for the COVID spike protein, but a protective lipid nanoparticle envelope that carried the RNA to cells in the body. RNA has immense potential beyond vaccines, for instance, as a way of stimulating cells to manufacture particular proteins; silencing certain genes; altering gene expression; and targeting CRISPR/CAS gene editing.

The mission of the AIRFoundry is to offer an AI-guided facility for biologists, veterinarians, biomedical researchers, and industry to develop and synthesize RNA and LNPs appropriate for different therapeutic uses. This exceeds the capabilities of existing scientific question-answering tools, and needs to be done while simultaneously “bootstrapping” a community of users. In this talk, I will describe our early experiences and innovations in developing AI question answering and “lead discovery” tools for promising candidate RNAs and LNPs — even as our collaborators build out tools for RNA and LNP optimization, and robot-driven synthesis.

Collaborative work with Daeyeon Lee, David Issadore, Drew Weissman, Claribel Acevedo-Velez, Joost Wagenaar, Sharath Guntuku, Rodolfo Ramanach, Masoud Soroush, Jake Gardner, Mark Yatskar, Jiaming Liang, Varun Jana, Haydn Jones, and John Frommeyer.

Seminar Recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jsi-4eQoiPYg9u-ivvh4KflLC6oTY7Mr/view?usp=drive_link