A-Alpha Awarded Additional $14.5M from the DOD to Accelerate Antibody Discovery and Optimization for Likely Biothreats

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In a milestone for supercomputing-aided drug design, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics today announced clinical trials have begun for a first-in-class medication that targets specific genetic mutations implicated in many types of cancer. The drug discovery work was powered by LLNL supercomputers Ruby (shown), Quartz and Lassen. Graphic by Amanda Levasseur.

Funding from the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense (JPEO-CBRND) will expand A-Alpha's partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in support of the Generative Unconstrained Intelligent Drug Engineering (GUIDE) program. This announcement follows two years of successful collaboration between A-Alpha and LLNL – beginning with coronaviruses and expanding to multiple undisclosed pathogen families of concern – in which A-Alpha’s AlphaSeq data has been used to train ML models that predict antibody-antigen binding. 

To learn more, see today’s press release here and coverage in Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.