AI in Service of LifeLanguages - #SFTechWeek
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❛o❛ツ´◡`This salon invites discussion on LifeLanguage companies and their use of AI as a force for good in healthcare.
LifeLanguage companies specialize in building new AI models to understand the languages of life—proteins, RNA, and DNA. These companies differ from traditional biotech in that they investigate these languages not with wet-lab approaches but with GPUs. AlphaFold is a leading example in this nascent space and won the Nobel Prize last year. Since then, many startups have modeled their teams after the AlphaFold team, generating sister models that rearrange protein space to form combinations that would have taken evolution hundreds of millions of years to create. These new rearrangements have special properties for curing human disease, strengthening agriculture, and improving manufacturing.
At Ecotone, our mission is to pioneer the next frontier: a model we call Hawaiian Diamond, capable of reading the human genome-as-a-first-language. The challenge is that AlphaFold was possible because of 3D protein data (PDB), where each protein structure serves as a spatial scaffold. For DNA, which is an encoded information space, no such training data exists (AlphaGenome, NT, etc have a priori constraints). Our breakthrough is a novel method to create this data by shifting from spatial to functional understanding. We interlace, arrange, and layer genomic outputs to build a functional scaffold—the "Point Cloud Feature"—that assigns meaning to sections of DNA. Hawaiian Diamond, trained on these scaffolds, will directly pinpoint the root causes of disease, generating the GPS coordinates needed by DNA-guided medications (e.g., CRISPRs) to cure all 10,000 genetic diseases. This will improve the lives of approximately 800 million people and begin the process of fully annotating the mysterious, unresolved sections of our DNA.
Come and discuss over champagne [no oysters, too risky :(] at a secret cozy space. Thanks to our sponsors Columbia University Venture Community (CVC SF) and #SFTechWeek.
Format: Fireside chat followed by conversation and good vibes. Location will be made available the day before the event.
This event is a part of #SFTechWeek—a week of events hosted by VCs and startups to bring together the tech ecosystem. Learn more at www.tech-week.com.
Guest List
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