protein-language-models
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Surge Biswas
Surge Biswas is the co-founder and CEO of Nabla Bio, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech that designs antibodies with AI. As a graduate student in George Church's Harvard lab he helped pioneer protein language modeling, a technique now central to machine-learning-guided protein design. At Nabla he built JAM, a generative system he calls 'molecular auto-complete' that designs therapeutic antibodies from a target sequence alone, including against notoriously undruggable membrane proteins like GPCRs. The company has raised roughly $37M and struck collaborations with Takeda, AstraZeneca, and Bristol Myers Squibb worth over a billion dollars in potential payments.
Ali Madani
Ali Madani is the founder and CEO of Profluent, the AI-first protein design company based in Emeryville, California. A machine learning researcher by training, he holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and pioneered the use of large language models to generate functional proteins from scratch - first at Salesforce AI Research as the architect of ProGen, then at Profluent where his team created OpenCRISPR-1, the world's first AI-designed and open-source gene editor, published in Nature in 2025. With $150M in total funding from Bezos Expeditions, Altimeter Capital, Spark Capital, and Insight Partners, Madani is on a mission to make biology programmable - designing proteins that don't exist in nature to solve the biggest challenges in human health, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.