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Generative AI for protein design

Diffuse is building generative AI for protein design. Our mission is to build AI systems that engineer new and useful proteins with unprecedented control and accuracy. Our team has been behind breakthroughs in AI protein design for the past 7 years, including the first experimental validation of AI-generated proteins and diffusion models for protein structure and sequence.

Jobs at Diffuse Bio

Menlo Park, CA, US / Remote (US; CA)
$90K - $130K
0.10% - 0.60%
3+ years
Menlo Park, CA / Remote (US)
$90K - $130K
0.05% - 0.60%
3+ years
Diffuse Bio
Founded:2022
Team Size:10
Location:San Carlos, CA
Group Partner:Surbhi Sarna

Active Founders

Namrata Anand, Founder

I’m a bioengineer / computer scientist who’s worked on problems at the intersection of machine learning and biology. For the past several years, I’ve been working on re-envisioning the computational protein design toolkit with AI. Some highlights are the first crystal structures of AI-designed proteins and diffusion models for protein structure generation.
Namrata Anand
Namrata Anand
Diffuse Bio

Company Launches

Hi 👋🏾 I’m Namrata, founder of ⚛️⚛️⚛️ Diffuse Bio! ⚛️⚛️⚛️

At Diffuse, we computationally design therapeutics, vaccines, and enzymes better, faster, and cheaper — but most importantly, we generate molecules that simply can’t be designed with existing methods today.

The Problem:

Proteins are macromolecules that mediate a significant fraction of the cellular processes that underlie life. An important task in bioengineering is designing proteins with specific 3D structures and chemical properties which enable targeted functions.

So far, computational protein design methods have had some success — but have enormous limitations, the primary one being low success in downstream validation experiments. These methods are also painfully slow and scale poorly.

What we do:

For the past several years, I’ve been working on re-envisioning the computational protein design toolkit with AI in my PhD and beyond, with the goal of overcoming these challenges. Some highlights are the first crystal structures of AI-designed proteins (i.e. experimental validation) and the first diffusion models for protein structure and sequence generation. Below you can see one of our early models producing structures unconditionally from noise!

Now, we’re scaling up these methods and applying them to grand challenge problems in molecular design. We’re able to handle a whole array of protein engineering tasks at the push of a button — from loop redesign and sequence engineering, all the way to binder design and de novo structure generation.

Curious to learn more?

Check out our coverage in the New York Times and NBC news, and get in touch at info@diffuse.bio!

We’d love your help!

  • If you’re working on any protein or molecular engineering problem, we’d love to hear from you!
  • We’d love intros to pharma and biotech companies working on problems in protein therapeutics, antigen design, and enzyme design.
  • We’d also love intros to any companies (preferably early stage) doing high-throughput protein characterization assays (yeast display, phage display, etc).
  • Sign up here to beta test our first-gen protein design software!