Nvidia and partner Evozyne has announced the results of new research that shows that their technologies have created novel proteins which were never before seen in nature. AI has helped create these proteins faster and with better results.
The research results were announced during the recent J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
The Nvidia and Evozyne research focused on the phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) protein family. PAH is an enzyme needed to break down phenylalanine, an amino acid found in certain foods. PAH deficiency leads to a rare disorder called phenylketonuria (PKU), in which phenylalanine levels build up in the body and cause neurological impairment. Patients who have this inherited disorder manage it by maintaining a strict diet that avoids phenylalanine-containing food.
In the research described by Nvidia, Evozyne was able to create a PAH protein with 51 mutations. Despite all of those changes, that protein was still able to achieve a two-and-a-half times enhancement in functionality compared to native human PAH, Powell said. Going further, the technology was able to design a PAH protein with 167 mutations. Despite changing more than half of the protein, that version of PAH still retained its function.
Currently, PKU has few FDA-approved therapies.
The novel proteins stem from a collaboration between the two companies and neither company develops new drugs. But their technologies are used by biotech and pharmaceutical companies working in drug discovery.
Nvidia and Evozyne began working together in 2022, collaborating to develop a new deep-learning model that can learn the rules of protein function. Using those rules, they aimed to design new proteins with improved functions. The model was built on Nvidia’s technology for training and deploying large language models for biology.
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