Professor Xu Jinbo was elected ISCBFollow: leading AI Protein folding and subverting protein design

Recently, the International Society for Computational biology (ISCB) announced that Xu Jinbo, a computational biologist, founder of Molecular Heart, and outstanding visiting professor of the Institute of Intelligent Industry (AIR) of Tsinghua University, was elected ISCBFollow for the reason of "bringing disruptive changes to Protein structure prediction by creating new computing methods and software programs".Founded in 1997, ISCB is the most important international academic organization in the field of Computational biology and bioinformatics

Recently, the International Society for Computational biology (ISCB) announced that Xu Jinbo, a computational biologist, founder of Molecular Heart, and outstanding visiting professor of the Institute of Intelligent Industry (AIR) of Tsinghua University, was elected ISCBFollow for the reason of "bringing disruptive changes to Protein structure prediction by creating new computing methods and software programs".

Founded in 1997, ISCB is the most important international academic organization in the field of Computational biology and bioinformatics. ISCBFellow is selected based on the importance of scientific contributions made by scholars, aiming to commend outstanding members who have made significant contributions in the fields of Computational biology and bioinformatics, such as Michael Levitt, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Gunnar von Heine, the former member of the Nobel Prize Committee, and Li Ming, the founder of modern Information theory. Since the 2009 ISCB Fellow selection, the average number of scientists elected each year has been only eight, with few Chinese scientists among them.

Xu Jinbo is known as the "founder of AI Protein folding" in the industry. He is a postdoctoral fellow of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He used to be a Academic tenure at the Toyota Institute of Computing Technology in Chicago, USA, and a senior fellow of Illumina, a gene sequencing giant. He has won the Sloan Research Award, the Early Career Award of the National Natural Science Foundation of America, and the Breakthrough Prize Award for Innovation in PLoS Computational Biology for many times International top awards such as the RECOMB Best Paper Award and Time Test Award of the International Top Conference of computational biology. Among the 50 invited speakers of the 2022 Nobel Symposium, Xu Jinbo is the only representative of Chinese Mainland.

In this election, ISCB evaluated Professor Xu Jinbo as "bringing disruptive changes to Protein structure prediction by creating new computing methods and software programs". Professor Xu Jinbo put forward the first AI Protein folding algorithm RaptorX-Contact in 2016, which proved the feasibility of deep learning method to predict Protein structure for the first time, realized the breakthrough of AI Protein structure prediction from 0 to 1, promoted the change of traditional scientific paradigm, and also opened a huge imagination space for AI biological industry development. The AlphaFold2 developed by DeepMind in 2020 is based on the core idea of this algorithm.

AI Protein structure prediction has solved the problem that has puzzled scientists for nearly 60 years, and is of great significance to the industry. Based on this technology, the speed of drawing target proteins has significantly improved, and innovative drug research and development has ushered in new opportunities. Based on this technology, the field of Synthetic biology can also analyze the mechanism of catalytic enzymes and other core elements, laying an important foundation for biological "intelligence".

"The more important value of AI Protein structure prediction lies in the promotion and verification of protein design," said Professor Xu Jinbo. In recent years, Professor Xu Jinbo has continued to call on all sectors to turn their attention to the field of protein design. He believes that AI protein prediction is just the beginning. The key to the disruptive breakthrough of biotechnology in the future, and even the reconstruction of Bioeconomy, lies in AI protein design technology. "With AI, we can design proteins that do not exist in nature or transform existing proteins according to specific Functional requirement, which will bring revolutionary changes to Drug development, high-performance materials, environmental protection, green agriculture, food and other fields."

In 2021, Professor Xu Jinbo returned to China and joined the Intelligent Industry Research Institute of Tsinghua University as an outstanding visiting professor. He also established the AI Protein Design Platform Company, aiming to break through research and industry barriers and promote the development of China's own AI life sciences.

In terms of technology, Professor Xu Jinbo led the team to continuously achieve innovative breakthroughs from 0 to 1, and successively launched more than ten world leading AI algorithms, including the world's first AI algorithm that can simultaneously predict side chains and design protein sequences, the first template free protein ligand generation algorithm, and the first end-to-end protein flexible docking algorithm. Relevant achievements have been published multiple times in the sub journals of Science and Nature Top academic journals such as the Journal of the American Academy of Sciences. Recently, ChatGPT has ignited a wave of generative AI, and Xu Jinbo was using similar methods to develop protein design algorithms as early as 2019, gradually breaking through in the AI protein generation big model, using universal underlying algorithms to build "infrastructure", in order to more accurately meet diversified and personalized industrial level protein generation needs.

To promote the development and industrial application of AI protein design technology, Professor Xu Jinbo led the Molecular Heart team to launch the industry's first fully functional AI protein prediction, optimization, and design platform MoleculeOS, filling the gap in the world where there is no fully functional AI protein design and optimization platform. This platform can use the method of "generating" rather than "discovering" proteins to design protein products with specific functions according to the application needs of Drug design, Synthetic biology and other fields, such as significantly improving some industrial enzymes or completely de novo designing enzymes; Or, for example, a protein with a design function similar to natural protein but less amino acids, which is more conducive to binding or delivery, or a protein that can bind to a specific small molecule, or an enzyme that can bind to a specific substrate.

The breakthrough in underlying technology will be a catalyst for the transformation of the biotechnology industry, "said Xu Jinbo. The competition in biotechnology has already swept the world, and he hopes to use the world's leading AI protein underlying technology to enable China to occupy a high position in this competition.

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