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Profluent, spurred by Salesforce research and backed by Jeff Dean, uses AI to discover medicines


Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins

In an interview with TechCrunch, Madani describes Profluent’s mission as “reversing the drug development paradigm”: starting with patient and therapeutic needs and working backwards to create “custom-fit” treatments solution. Proteins — chains of bonded-together amino acids that the body uses for various purposes, from making hormones to repairing bone and muscle tissue — can be treated like words in a paragraph, Madani discovered. And DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, has a system called AlphaFold that predicts complete protein structures, achieving speed and accuracy far surpassing older, less complex algorithmic methods.

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