Chai Discovery has completed a $130 million Series B financing that the artificial intelligence (AI)-based de novo antibody designer says will help it accelerate its research and product development, as well as grow its commercialization efforts toward creating the equivalent of a computer-aided design suite for molecules. Chai—a portmanteau for “chemistry” and “AI”—creates de novo antibodies through its Chai-2 platform. The company says Chai-2 is the first zero-shot generative platform to achieve double-digit success rates in experiments focused on de novo antibody design. Chai unveiled Chai-2 in June with a preprint posted in bioRxiv that reported a 16% success rate in fully de novo antibody design of ≤20 antibodies or nanobodies to 52 diverse targets—a more than 100-fold improvement over previous computational methods. Chai researchers completed the workflow from AI design to wet-lab validation in under two weeks. “We actually tested as few as 20 molecules for each one of those targets. Most papers in this space were putting out data on 2 or 3 molecules,” Josh Meier, Chai’s co-founder and CEO, as well as the preprint’s corresponding author, told GEN. “Given the really high success rates of the models, we’ve actually now been able to test this at a really large scale. We published a benchmark on over 50 targets, and since then, we’ve done way more than 100.” Earlier this month, Chai posted an updated preprint highlighting the company’s expansion of de novo antibody design by applying Chai-2 to design therapeutic full-length monoclonal antibodies across conventional and challenging target…
