Backed by $1 billion, Xaira Therapeutics is readying AI-generated drugs
Rowan Walrath · C&EN Global Enterprise · 2024
When Hetu Kamisetty was a postdoctoral researcher in David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington just over a decade ago, artificial intelligence was a nascent technology. Kamisetty built some early software models that could predict protein structures and then design them, but it was “the basic science era,” he says. “It wasn’t at that inflection point.” That’s changed. Baker and his peers have begun using large language models and diffusion to dream up new proteins , generating different molecules just as ChatGPT generates text. And for the last eight months, Kamisetty has been leading artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts at a new start-up called Xaira Therapeutics, which formally launched Tuesday with $1 billion in venture capital—one of the largest venture deals in the history of the biotech industry. Endpoints News first reported the launch . Xaira seeks to build on Baker’s RFdiffusion model, which is capable of designing,