Why It's Important: Proteins are the most complex molecules in nature and mediate various processes essential to life. While natural proteins perform vital biological functions, their native functionalities are often sub-optimal for practical applications. Designing new proteins with desired functions has the potential to extend the function repository of proteins that nature has so far evolved.
Our Approach: This project aims to develop new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and explore its new opportunities for accelerating scientific discovery in biology, particularly designing proteins for important applications such as therapeutics, clean energy, and sustainability. Leveraging the recent progress in GenAI, such as large language models (LLMs), we will develop a protein-focused foundation model based on LLMs of protein sequences, incorporating experimental data of protein functions to steer the LLM in favor of generating functional proteins.