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DeepMind unveils AI system that designs enzymes no living cell ever made
Google DeepMind says its new system designed an enzyme that makes a key drug ingredient 99 times faster than the industrial process chemists currently rely on. That's not an improvement on nature. Nature never built this enzyme at all. Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind's vice president of science and strategic initiatives, announced a preprint for a system called AlphaProtein Novo on X on October 5. He described it as a generative model for designing enzymes from scratch, rather than tweaking ones that already exist in biology. The team built two custom enzymes to prove it works. One synthesizes piperidine, a molecular ring structure found in a huge share of pharmaceutical compounds. The other breaks down DEHP, a phthalate plasticizer regulators have flagged for links to reproductive harm and liver damage, and that the EPA now considers a probable carcinogen. Neither enzyme exists anywhere in nature. That's the point. Enzyme engineers have spent two decades mutating natural proteins, nudging an existing fold a few amino acids at a time until it does something slightly different or slightly faster. AlphaProtein Novo instead generates an entirely new protein sequence and structure built around a target chemical reaction, with no natural template to start from. DeepMind...
