AION Labs spots unique opportunity for AI-driven antibody discovery

AION Labs, a first-of-its-kind innovation lab spearheading the adoption of AI technologies and computational science to solve therapeutic challenges, and German independent research institute BioMed X, announced today the launch of the first global call for application to identify biomedical scientists and inventors to form a new startup at AION Labs’ headquarters in Rehovot, Israel.

The chosen AION Labs startup team will be sponsored by several industry-leading partners and supported by the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA). The sponsors of this call for application are AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer, Teva and the Israel Biotech Fund, with close support from Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We are excited to extend our portfolio of career opportunities for talented academic researchers to Israel,” said Dr. Christian Tidona, Founder and Managing Director of the BioMed X Institute. “Located in the heart of the ‘startup nation,’ AION Labs is the perfect place for biomedical scientists from around the globe to learn how to become successful biotech entrepreneurs.”

Therapeutic antibodies are well established life-saving drugs. Discovery of existing therapeutic antibodies relies on immunization or in-vitro selection from large, pre-defined libraries with limited sequence space coverage. Selecting a drug candidate from billions of potential antibody sequences is laborious and expensive and, in many cases, fails to identify functional antibodies. Recent advances in protein structure prediction, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, and increased availability of experimentally determined antigen-antibody structures present a unique opportunity for AI-driven antibody discovery.

AION Labs is inviting computational biologists and biomedical scientists at academic and industry research labs worldwide to propose the development of a next-generation general computational platform for the design of high-affinity and biophysically well-behaved antibody binders directed towards epitopes of choice, starting from an antigen structure or antigen sequence as an input. The AION Labs pharma partners involved in this project will provide a wealth of data for model training and their expertise in setting specifications and evaluating the outcome. Original ideas that go far beyond the current state-of-the-art are being encouraged.

“AION Labs is proud and excited to be launching our first call for application,” said Mati Gill, CEO of AION Labs. “We look forward to providing the chosen startup with our strong resources and mentorship as we work together to develop a cutting-edge solution to overcome the pharmaceutical challenge of selecting drug candidates from antibody sequences. This is just the beginning.”

As part of the online application procedure, interested candidates are requested to submit a competitive project proposal. After a preliminary short-listing round, candidates will be invited to a five-day innovation boot camp in Rehovot. With the support of experienced mentors from the pharma, tech and VC industries, the winning team of scientists will be trained and guided during a fully-funded incubation period of up to four years towards becoming an independent startup. PR Newswire