Entrepreneurship and The Promise of De Novo Protein Design

What’s important about de novo protein design from an entrepreneurship perspective? Everything. As the founder of AI Proteins, Chris Bahl leads a company focused on building proteins completely from scratch. The research and subject matter itself are nothing new to Chris, but the entrepreneurial side of his work certainly is. From October 2017 to October 2021, Chris served as the head of protein design for the Institute of Protein Innovation, a Boston-based research institution. One month later, however, he and his team opted to leave the research world and launch a new biotech company, AI Proteins. While the primary purpose of academic research in protein design is to learn more about the nature of proteins as they relate to disease, Chris believes the main mission of biotechnology is to cure it—and he definitely wanted to be on the “curing” side. AI Proteins is expanding the possibilities of protein therapeutics by rationally designing entirely new proteins, or as they’re officially called, de novo proteins. Using AI-based design and a high-throughput drug-discovery platform, the company creates synthetic proteins from scratch and seeks to optimize a specific protein’s activity for a variety of therapeutic applications. The objective is to enable the development of proteins that are inexpensive, durable, highly specific, and can be optimized for oral delivery. Such a lofty goal is what entrepreneurship in its truest sense is really about. It’s also a fascinating story to hear in the founder’s own words. About our guest: Chris Stahl is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of AI Proteins, an Andover, Massachusetts-based company focused on ways to harness the power of synthetically designed proteins to cure diseases. The former head of protein design at the Institute for Protein Innovation, Chris is also a lecturer at both the Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as a TED Fellow. His areas of expertise include computational protein design, structural biology, biochemistry, and in part