Researchers at the University of Toronto have used an artificial intelligence framework to redesign a crucial protein involved in the delivery of gene therapy. The study, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, describes new work optimizing proteins to mitigate immune responses, thereby improving the efficacy of gene therapy and reducing side effects. The AI-model can be utilized beyond gene therapy protein design and could likely be expanded to support protein design in other disease cases as well.

Garton's lab used AI to custom-design variants of hexons that are distinct from natural sequences. Suyue Lyu and Michael Garton developed an AI framework dubbed ProteinVAE. The model can be trained to learn the characteristics of a long protein using limited data. Despite its compact design, ProteinVAE exhibits a generative capability comparable to larger available models.

New AI model designs proteins to deliver gene therapy