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Partnership For A joint Biocomputing Lab To Promote Sustainable Development | |
| Sumita Pawar |
Through a signing ceremony, BioMap, a leading AI life science platform, announced its strategic cooperation with Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), a world-leading artificial intelligence research institution, in establishing a joint laboratory.
The report says that the lab will be the first place in the Middle East to do research on biocomputing innovations.The joint laboratory announced its research would be carried out in two distinct directions: the de novo design of oil degradation enzymes and mining for potential drug targets for the treatment of aging-related and rare diseases.
Using BioMap’s world-leading cross-modal bio-computing model, "xTrimo (Cross-modal Transformer Representation of Interactome and Multi-Omics)," the two parties aim to explore new technologies to advance large-scale life science models in protein generation, protein structure prediction, cell function prediction, and other life science tasks.
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The two parties will focus on driving breakthroughs in AI-generated proteins (AIGP) by prioritising the Middle East's extensive needs in medical health, drug design, energy, and environmental protection.
Jiarun Qu, who is Vice President of Strategic Development at BioMap, and Dr. Kun Zhang, who works at Mohamed bin Zayed University (MBZUAI), were at the signing ceremony.During the ceremony, the two organisations introduced their collaboration roadmap, and BioMap shared the technical progress made with its xTrimo model system and its strategic development plan for the Middle East.
As the world’s largest cross-modal life science model, xTrimo models how proteins, cells, and complex biological systems work together, allowing downstream models to learn the operating laws of biological systems and analyse how proteins interact with each other and with cells in the human body.
"xTrimo is capable of predicting and generating new proteins that can perform targeted interventions and treatments on cells and the human body to address specific needs," stated the report.
xTrimo has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in various areas such as protein structure prediction, antibody sequence generation, and cell characterization. Additionally, it has made breakthroughs in predicting cell function and designing new drugs from scratch, according to the report.
Furthermore, the report mentioned that scientists have been exploring the use of enzymes to efficiently degrade contamination caused by oil.
One type of enzyme, alkanes, is the major component of crude oils and is commonly found in oil-contaminated environments.
Although some types of alkane oxygenase can be extracted from microbes, those enzymes usually require a higher temperature to function with ideal catalytic activity, which can complicate such applications as marine oil spill cleanup, oil and gas storage, and transportation.
With this challenge in mind, BioMap plans to use its AIGP platform to de novo design a protein with a 10-fold improvement in alkane oxygenase catalytic function at lower temperatures and without coenzyme assistance. The same methodology could enhance the performance and broaden the applications of oil degradation enzymes and oil recovery enzymes by optimising their catalytic efficiency under different conditions.
Besides cooperating on energy sustainability, as the report highlighted, the two parties will also focus on scientific research on aging-related diseases, a major public health challenge around the world.
In recent years, research on drug targets for diseases related to ageing has become one of the most important areas in the field of life sciences. This is because people are living longer and the population is getting older. The two groups will work together to find drug targets for diseases related to ageing faster by using large-scale AI models and multi-omics pre-training. This will make it possible to create personalised treatments.