Latent Labs reposted this
For Latent Labs, the shift in antibody discovery is no longer just about finding better binders faster. It is about replacing iterative screening with generative design that starts closer to a drug-like candidate. In his talk, Simon Kohl argued that the field is moving from lab-based discovery toward prompt-driven molecular design. He framed Latent-X2 as a frontier model spanning peptides, cyclic peptides, minibinders, and drug-like antibodies. The strongest claim from the talk was not only binding performance, but also developability: Kohl said the model’s designed antibody formats were already developable 47% of the time without optimization, based on measures including thermal stability, monomericity, yield, polyreactivity, and hydrophobicity. He also described Latent-Y, a protein design agent intended to turn that modeling capability into a working design workflow. In the example shown on stage, the agent moved from a text prompt to lab-validated nanobody recommendations, compressing work that would otherwise take weeks of computation into an afternoon. The broader case was clear: antibody design is starting to look less like library search and more like programmable biology. #SynBioBeta #SyntheticBiology #Biotech