Protein folding

• But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.
• Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering.
• Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics.
• It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.

Quantumness in biology is probably real

• In general, quantum effects only manifest at very small length and mass scales, or when temperatures approach absolute zero.
• This is because quantum objects like atoms and molecules lose their “quantumness” when they uncontrollably interact with each other and their environment.
• Research suggests that quantum effects influence biological functions, including regulating enzyme activity, sensing magnetic fields, cell metabolism and electron transport in biomolecules.

How to study quantum biology

• Studying quantum mechanical effects in biology requires tools that can measure the short time scales, small length scales and subtle differences in quantum states that give rise to physiological changes – all integrated within a traditional wet lab environment.
• In my work, I build instruments to study and control the quantum properties of small things like electrons.
• In the same way that electrons have mass and charge, they also have a quantum property called spin.
• The missing piece of the puzzle is, hence, a “deterministic codebook” of how to map quantum causes to physiological outcomes.

A whole new way of doing science

• How do you build community and train scientists to work in this area?
• The existence of quantum biology as a discipline implies that traditional understanding of life processes is incomplete.

• Quantiphi has been named the NVIDIA Partner Network Service Delivery Partner of the Year for the Americas for the second year in a row, due to its exemplary contribution in the fields of Applied AI and data science
  MARLBOROUGH, Mass., April 4, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Quantiphi, an AI-first digital engineering platforms and services company, has been named the 2023 NVIDIA Partner Network (NPN) Service Delivery Partner (SDP) of the Year for the Americas region.
• Quantiphi earns this accolade for its deep technical understanding of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software stack and NVIDIA DGX platform , coupled with subject-matter expertise in large language models, genomics, physics-informed machine learning, and hybrid computing.
• "This award embodies our mastery in building and scaling enterprise-grade solutions with the NVIDIA AI, DGX and Jetson Orin platforms," said Asif Hasan, Co-founder at Quantiphi.
• We look forward to continuing to drive the adoption of NVIDIA products in the enterprise across all cloud platforms and industries."

• This model is one of the closest alternatives to DeepMind's AlphaFold-2, which reportedly resolved the 50-year-old grand challenge of in silico protein folding.
• ESM-2 Fold inference is quicker at enabling the investigation of structural spaces of metagenomic proteins, even though AlphaFold-2 and RoseTTAFold have higher accuracy.
• When linked together, they form a Knowledge Graph that constitutes over 660 million HYFTs and more than 25 billion relations.
• Recently, the Company also added more than 20 million structural HYFTs (S_HYFTs) to this Graph, and continuously adds metadata and relations.

• Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated (Nasdaq: VRTX) today announced the advancement of its investigational program targeting alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), a rare, genetic disease characterized by a protein folding defect that can lead to liver and lung disease.
• VX-634 is an investigational small molecule that promotes proper folding of Z-AAT protein and is being evaluated for the treatment of alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.
• The primary endpoint will be the mean change from baseline in blood levels of functional alpha-1 antitrypsin at Week 48.
• Vertex disclaims any obligation to update the information contained in this press release as new information becomes available.