Ali Madani

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@thisismadani

founder / ceo of profluent. build frontier ai models for protein design, create cures.

San Francisco, CA madani.ai Joined July 2014

1.1K Following 8K Followers 479 Posts

Latest posts 5

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Ali Madani @thisismadani Apr 28

AI has two modes in drug discovery. Accelerate: moving faster through the existing playbook. Unlock: opening frontiers that weren't possible before.

Excited to announce Profluent is partnering with Eli Lilly, the global pharma powerhouse, to unlock breakthrough medicines for patients.

It's a big deal beyond the numbers ($2.25B + royalties): we’ll get to use our frontier AI models and foundational datasets to design proteins focused on large gene insertion, a therapeutic moonshot.

Proteins govern almost everything in biology. We've built a generalizable AI platform to design all proteins. Onward!

0:19

Ali Madani @thisismadani Oct 23

Boston biotech for ages: we don’t want to be seen as a CRO, that’s beneath us

Warp:

Lightspeed @lightspeedvp Oct 22

While AI has advanced in mathematics, we believe there’s still a major gap in the physical sciences.

@warpsciences co-founders @kevinweil and Solomon Reisberg joined Lightspeed Partner @guruchahal to discuss how their labs could generate the experimental data needed to advance scientific AI.

The company recently emerged from stealth and is building US chemistry labs to make research compounds for biotech and pharma companies.

“First be the hands, then build the nervous system, and then over time become the brain,” says Warp’s CEO Kevin.

The plan starts with expert chemists making molecules for customers. Cameras and sensors would record the work, helping Warp automate tasks and train models to improve how compounds are made.

More capable labs could let researchers pursue ideas for new medicines that time and cost currently put out of reach. The experiments could also produce more evidence for scientific AI to learn from.

Thank you to Kevin and Solomon for joining us!

Full episode below.

0:00 The Future Of Automated Labs
0:43 Introducing Warp Sciences And Founders
1:48 Kevin's Journey And Sol's Background
5:03 Building Warp's Founding Team
10:54 What Is A CRO And How Drug Discovery Works
13:24 The Pain Points: IP, Single Supplier And Geopolitical Risk
15:58 How Warp Is Taking On The Challenge
21:45 Threading The Needle On IP And Data Sharing
25:14 The Future Of Automated Labs, Business Plan And Funding
33:21 Closing Thoughts

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Ali Madani @thisismadani Sep 30

we build foundation models that span all protein modalities (ie not just one type of medicine). this partnership with @BioMarin pharma is one piece of evidence towards that.

we'll have even more announcements soon on this point

Profluent Verified account @ProfluentBio Sep 30

We’re partnering with @BioMarin to use our AI models to design novel medicines.

Our foundation models unlock proteins with new and improved functions by drawing on the world's largest dataset of unique protein sequences (115B and counting): Profluent’s Protein Atlas

BioMarin will screen designs we generate and advance the strongest into preclinical testing. Looking forward to what AI can unlock for patients!

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Ali Madani @thisismadani Sep 25

Finished off a great day, we secured a ton of GPUs to design proteins and craned a *literal ton* of laboratory equipment to test proteins.

Build, build, build. We don’t stop

Ali Madani @thisismadani Sep 23

Great to see Dario funding this. I may know a thing or two about enzyme discovery and AI. I liked the work and think highly of the researchers behind it all (yes you’ll eventually find a person behind all the AI)

You can have it all in biology right now. The well of opportunity is deep.

Anthropic Verified account @AnthropicAI Sep 23

Claude has discovered a previously unknown enzyme system hidden in the DNA of bacteriophages. Beside the enzyme’s gene sits a long array of repeating DNA—a structure that looks somewhat similar to CRISPR.

We don’t yet understand what this system does, but only a handful of known systems share its features, and all of them are able to cut, copy, and paste DNA. Historically, the discovery of such programmable systems has helped revolutionize medicine. CRISPR, for instance, is now the foundation of genetic medicines. But it will take much more work to learn what this system does, and whether it can be put to similar use.

Read more: anthropic.com/news/claude-di…
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