BioNTech develops treatments and vaccines with artificial intelligence
German biotech and pharmaceutical company BioNTech has announced the development of AI-powered assistants. The company and its subsidiary InstaDeep unveiled their new AI strategy at a special event held by the company.
The strategy aims to use new models and super-fast computers to accelerate the development of vaccines and cancer treatments in particular.
BioNTech is focusing on developing personalized vaccines and AI-guided treatments, based on its DeepChain platform.
The platform has been successfully used in several projects, including an antibody production project, and has also been made available for partnerships with third parties, according to the company.
In addition, BioNTech unveiled its new supercomputer Kyber, designed to process big data.
In a related context, BioNTech and its company InstaDeep have developed a smart assistant called Layla, based on Meta’s open-source Lama 3.1 model.
Layla is used to automate routine tasks in experimental biology, such as DNA sequencing and displaying experimental results.
The smart assistant can communicate with lab equipment, monitor ongoing experiments, and report equipment failures.
Instadip CEO Karim Beguer described Layla as “an accelerator of productivity rather than an attempt to achieve full automation of AI.”
In addition, the two companies are developing new AI-based models for generating protein sequences, and AI is expected to support several areas of immunotherapeutic development, including immunohistochemistry, DNA and RNA sequencing, protein design, and in vitro validation.
