A Smarter Alternative Against the Current Antibody Engineering Processes to Expedite Drug Discovery

Zifo has officially announced the launch of its Antibody Engineering application, which happens to be a cloud-native GenAI platform built on the Snowflake Data Cloud.

According to certain reports, the stated platform makes it possible for biopharma companies, research institutions, and contract research organizations to design and optimize therapeutic antibodies faster, potentially shortening the timeline for new drug discovery.

More on the same would reveal how this platform banks upon Snowpark Container Services to provide a no-code, intuitive interface for scientists and bioinformaticians. Thanks to the given mechanism, users can seamlessly fine-tune powerful protein language models like ProtGPT2, RoBERTa, and ESM2 on their proprietary datasets without having to move sensitive information outside of their secure Snowflake environment. 

Such a mechanism, like you can guess, should be able to facilitate the entire discovery pipeline, right from generating novel antibody sequences to predicting their 3D structures and analyzing key regions. 

To understand the significance of such a development, we must take into account how the development of new antibody-based therapies is traditionally a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. 

Against that, Zifo’s Antibody Engineering app effectively integrates state-of-the-art AI into a seamless, end-to-end workflow which promises to improve the hit rate for high-affinity therapeutic antibodies.

“Zifo Antibody Engineering, combined with Snowflake’s infrastructure, offers life sciences a cutting-edge tool for research development,” said Lisa Arbogast, Industry Principal for Healthcare and Life Sciences Ecosystem at Snowflake. “Together, we enable use of data to its fullest potential while helping customers adhere to high standards of security and compliance.”

Talk about how the given technology will aid things for various departments across a life sciences ecosystem, we begin from biopharma R&D teams that can leverage Zifo’s latest brainchild to streamline antibody discovery. This they can achieve by generating novel sequences and predicting binding affinities faster than traditional methods.

Next up, we have a use case for CDMOs and CROs, who can offer AI-powered protein engineering as a service to clients developing therapeutic antibodies.

Another use case worth a mention is concerned with academic and research institutions. These institutions can leverage advanced protein modeling tools to widen the horizon of present-day computational biology and structural bioinformatics.

Rounding up highlights would be a use case revolving around clinical and preclinical development, a process which can now validate AI-generated antibodies with experimental data, expediting lead selection.

Among other things, it ought to be acknowledged that the underlying architecture is designed for high-performance AI workloads. This translates to how you can handle massive datasets and multi-modal inputs in a simple and straightforward manner, all within Snowflake’s managed environment. 

You see, once a user has fine-tuned their models, they can seamlessly generate new antibody sequences, visualize their 3D protein structures, download PDB files, and review analysis of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs). 

Founded in 2008, Zifo’s rise up the ranks stems from providing AI and data-driven enterprise informatics for science-driven organizations. The company’s portfolio of solutions, at present, span research, development, manufacturing, and clinical domains. 

Zifo’s excellence in what it does can also be understood once you consider it is trusted by more than 190 science-focused organizations worldwide, including pharma, biotech, chemicals, food and beverage, oil and gas, and FMCG companies.

“We are entering a new era of drug discovery, one where AI and data converge to solve biology’s most complex puzzles,” said Chris McClure, Head of Solution Services for Zifo in North America. “Zifo Antibody Engineering is more than just a tool; it’s a strategic partner for scientists. By building it as a Snowflake Native App, we’re giving researchers the power to innovate faster, reduce R&D costs, and ultimately bring life-saving therapies to patients sooner. We’ve effectively democratized access to complex AI, removing the need for deep machine learning expertise.”