NEW DELHI— Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Friday announced the launch of BioEmu, a powerful new AI system designed to decode protein motion and dramatically speed up the drug discovery process.
The new deep learning model, officially named Biomolecular Emulator-1 (BioEmu-1), can generate thousands of protein structures per hour using just a single graphics processing unit (GPU).
“Understanding protein motion is essential to understanding biology and advancing drug discovery,” Nadella said in a post on social media platform X. “Today, we’re introducing BioEmu, an AI system that emulates the structural ensembles proteins adopt, delivering insights in hours that would otherwise require years of simulation.”
Proteins are central to virtually all biological processes—from building muscle tissue to defending the body against disease. While advances have been made in determining protein structures from amino acid sequences, comprehensively modeling the wide range of dynamic shapes a single protein can assume remained a major scientific challenge.
BioEmu-1 addresses that challenge by enabling researchers to visualize the structural “ensembles” or different conformations a protein can adopt. This deeper insight into protein flexibility and behavior is crucial for designing next-generation, targeted therapeutics.
According to a research paper shared by Microsoft, BioEmu integrates more than 200 milliseconds of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, static structural data, and experimental measurements of protein stability. It uses novel training algorithms to capture complex functional motions, such as cryptic pocket formation, local unfolding, and domain rearrangements—phenomena that are critical to understanding how drugs interact with proteins.
The model also predicts relative free energies with an accuracy of 1 kcal/mol compared to millisecond-scale MD simulations and experimental data.
“BioEmu provides mechanistic insights by jointly modeling structural ensembles and thermodynamic properties,” noted the AI for Science team at Microsoft Research in the Science journal article.
By significantly reducing the cost and time associated with generating MD and experimental data, BioEmu offers a scalable solution for exploring and designing protein function. This breakthrough is expected to open new frontiers in biomedical research, synthetic biology, and pharmaceutical innovation. (Source: IANS)
