Protein design is a search problem. Choose amino acids for an eight-residue protein sequence and more than 25 billion combinations are possible. Choose amino acids for a 100-residue protein sequence and the number of possibilities exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe. Somewhere in that space is a protein that opens a path to a new therapy. There are too many combinations to search exhaustively, so finding it depends on knowing where to look.

RFD4-Proteina , an NVIDIA BioNeMo open model co-developed with the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine, navigates that space using patterns learned from nature.…