The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a philanthropic research institute funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, has released a new AI system it describes as a "world model of protein biology." The models, based on Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM), can predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy and are designed to accelerate the development of new drugs and therapies for diseases like cancer.
The institute is making the models openly available to the scientific community to foster broader research and innovation. This initiative places Biohub in direct competition with other major players in the field of AI-driven protein folding, most notably Google's DeepMind, which developed the influential AlphaFold model.