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This is Science Friday.

I'm Flora Lichten.

Today on the podcast, exploring the frontier of AI and drug design.

We've gone from a situation where I would say kind of we were on the lunatic fringe

and everyone thought it was crazy to now kind of in the mainstream. It's a little bit weird.

Last week, we briefly touched on a recent nature paper where scientists unveiled new proteins

that can neutralize deadly snake venom, a type of toxin found

in cobras and their relatives that can be difficult to treat. A new anti-venom is a cool

discovery on its own, but there is a twist to this snake tail. These new proteins were designed by

AI. This is a fast-growing area of research, using AI to discover

or design the building blocks of drugs. Another team at Penn is using AI to search for new

potential antibiotics in the genomes of extinct species like Neanderthals and woolly mammoths.

I know it sounds almost too sci-fi to be on sci-fri,

but it is happening. Here to tell us more are two pioneers in this field, Dr. Cesar de la Fuente,

bioengineer and presidential associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,

and Nobel laureate, Dr. David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design,

and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Welcome to you both. It's great to be here.

Thank you. David, you focus on designing new proteins, which I think can feel a little abstract

for the non-protein designers out there.

How should we think about them?

How are you interested in using them?

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