STAT+: Two biotechs say they’re using AI to conjure drugs from scratch. Their documents suggest otherwise
A STAT examination shows how AI-powered biotechs like Absci and Generate Biomedicines routinely aggrandize their AI capabilities.
It was January 2023. Elon Musk owned Twitter, but it wasn’t yet called X. ChatGPT had been released barely six weeks earlier.
Absci CEO Sean McClain — tall, with short, gelled hair and a beard, the kind of all-American entrepreneur who mowed lawns to buy a video game as a kid but instead bought his first truck — got up on health care’s biggest stage, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. He pitched the synthetic biology company he had founded in a tiny basement lab in 2011, touting what he considered striking new evidence of Absci’s ability to create brand-new antibodies with artificial intelligence.
“Absci is the first and only company to design and validate new antibodies with a zero-shot generative AI,” McClain told a room of investors. “We’re doing this all from scratch on a computer. No one has ever done this before. This completely eliminates all the biological discovery technologies that currently exist, and this truly is the future.”
