The Heart of Molecules Xu Jinbo's speech at Zhongguancun Forum: AI protein design leads to new changes in biobased economy

On May 30, it was reported that at the Zhongguancun Forum "Scientific Research Forum Driven by Artificial Intelligence", Xu Jinbo, a well-known computational biologist, founder of Molecular Heart and outstanding visiting professor of the Institute of Intelligent Industry (AIR) of Tsinghua University, said that AI biology has become a new core field of global science and technology integration and innovation. Driven by emerging technologies such as AI protein design technology, the field of biotechnology is undergoing disruptive changes, The AI biological model will accelerate this process

On May 30, it was reported that at the Zhongguancun Forum "Scientific Research Forum Driven by Artificial Intelligence", Xu Jinbo, a well-known computational biologist, founder of Molecular Heart and outstanding visiting professor of the Institute of Intelligent Industry (AIR) of Tsinghua University, said that AI biology has become a new core field of global science and technology integration and innovation. Driven by emerging technologies such as AI protein design technology, the field of biotechnology is undergoing disruptive changes, The AI biological model will accelerate this process.

Professor Xu Jinbo is known as the "founder of AI protein folding" in the industry. He invented the first generation of AI protein structure prediction method in 2016, which proved the feasibility of deep learning method to predict protein structure for the first time, and made pioneering contributions to protein structure prediction, a challenging field that has puzzled scientists for nearly 60 years. The AlphaFold algorithm developed by Google's DeepMind is based on its core idea.

Xu Jinbo believes that AI is currently regarded as the core driving force of a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation, and biobased economy has also become a strategic field of key investment by many countries around the world. AI and biology are developing together, becoming a new core field of global scientific and technological competition, and will drive trillions of direct economic benefits.

"As the underlying foundation of biotechnology, the integration of protein structure prediction and AI has brought disruptive changes to life science in the past few years." Xu Jinbo introduced that protein is the foundation of life, and protein drugs and related products have great value in life health, industry, agriculture and other fields. Since the 1950s, scientists have used various methods such as X-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance, and cryoelectron microscopy to "see" the three-dimensional structure of proteins and analyze their functions. However, due to technological limitations, the success rate is extremely low. Scientists who have successfully analyzed a certain protein structure in history or made breakthroughs in analytical technology have won Nobel Prizes repeatedly, which shows the difficulty and value of this problem.

"With AI method, human beings have basically solved the problem of protein structure prediction," Xu Jinbo said, but this is only the beginning. Only by designing proteins that do not exist in nature according to specific functional requirements, or transforming existing proteins, can we bring about a real disruptive breakthrough for biotechnology and a reconstruction opportunity for the entire biobased economy. "Drug research and development, green agriculture represented by agricultural breeding and green pesticides, high-performance materials, environmental protection, food and other fields will benefit from the development of AI protein design technology."

For example, in the traditional agricultural field, AI protein design technology is used in biological breeding to enhance key indicators such as broad-spectrum resistance, yield, and quality of crops. It can also be used to develop green pesticides that are harmless to human health and environmentally friendly, ensuring food security and food safety.

In the field of innovative drug research and development, the "double ten laws" of traditional new drug research and development are being broken, and AI protein design technology is driving the paradigm change of macromolecular innovative drug research and development, transforming the traditional screening "trial and error" mode into predictable and programmable, thereby improving research and development efficiency and success rate.

On the global issue of green and low-carbon, AI protein design technology is serving as a fundamental technology to support the transformation and upgrading of industries such as new materials and energy, and playing a valuable role in eliminating white pollution and improving the environment.

In Xu Jinbo's view, AI protein design is "difficult but meaningful". Recently, ChatGPT sparked a wave of generative AI, but he was using similar methods to develop protein design algorithms as early as 2019. We are developing an AI protein generation large model to build an 'infrastructure' using universally applicable underlying algorithms to meet diverse and personalized industrial level protein generation needs

Based on the breakthrough of AI algorithm, Xu Jinbo led a team to launch the AI protein optimization and design platform "MoleculeOS" to meet industrial needs. Targeting real needs in fields such as drug design and biological manufacturing, he designed protein products with specific functions using the method of "generating" rather than "discovering" proteins. The green fluorescent protein designed from scratch based on this platform is completely different from the conformation of fluorescent proteins in nature, but it has shown consistent functions or even higher performance in biological experiments; The highly toxic protein drugs modified based on this platform have been verified through animal experiments to have good efficacy and obvious detoxification characteristics; The industrial enzymes modified by this platform have also achieved significant improvements in thermal stability.

The experimental results demonstrate that our AI algorithm is universal and can be used for protein design in various modalities, thus supporting large-scale industrial applications. Xu Jinbo has a clear understanding of the future value of AI protein design, but he also stated that AI biology is an emerging field with highly interdisciplinary and deep technological integration, which still needs continuous innovation from 0 to 1, but talent is extremely scarce. To maintain and accelerate the strong development momentum in this field, it is urgent to cultivate high-level and integrated talents. "We hope that there will be more cooperation and exchanges to promote talent cultivation and technological breakthroughs, and provide a source of living water for the development of the global biobased economy."

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