One prominent example is ProteinMPNN, which came out of David Baker’s world-renowned lab at the University of Washington. Rather than using LLMs, the ProteinMPNN architecture relies heavily on protein structure data in order to generate novel proteins.

The Baker lab more recently published RFdiffusion, a more advanced and generalized protein design model. As its name suggests, RFdiffusion is built using diffusion models, the same AI technique that powers text-to-image models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. RFdiffusion can generate novel, customizable protein “backbones”—that is, proteins’ overall structural scaffoldings—onto which sequences can then be layered.