Is the Seattle area positioned to become the “Silicon Valley” of AI life sciences, claiming the top spot in this emerging field blending biotech and artificial intelligence?
Many of those in the sector say yes.
“Seattle is the best place in the world to build an AI life sciences company,” said Hetu Kamisetty, co-founder and chief technology officer of Xaira Therapeutics. “San Francisco is second.”
“Seattle has a perfect marriage of tech and life sciences,” echoed Naiteek Sangani, who is helping lead Microsoft’s use of generative AI in biology. The region offers “a very well-structured way for us to accelerate the inclusion of AI, health and life sciences.”
As the city strives for the No. 1 spot in this rapidly evolving field, new startups and initiatives keep bolstering its standing. Take Synthesize Bio, a startup launched by leaders at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The Seattle company this week disclosed a $10 million seed round and preprint publication describing its AI platform, which aims to make drug discovery faster and cheaper.
“All the right people are here to be able to build a really incredible company, both for ourselves, but also just in the ecosystem in general,” said Jeff Leek, co-founder of Synthesize Bio and chief data officer at Fred Hutch.
Seattle is home to numerous public and private efforts at the intersection of AI and biology, including:
- The University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design (IPD), which uses AI to build novel proteins to treat disease, address environmental problems and other issues.
- The Fred Hutch-led Cancer AI Alliance, a consortium of leading U.S. institutions applying AI to cancer.
- The Allen Institute and its Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, which is using a DNA-based technology to record cellular functions.
- Dozens of startups that include Xaira, which launched last year with $1 billion from investors and the goal of building on IPD models to develop new drugs. The company is based in San Francisco, but has labs and key players in Seattle.
At an AI and drug discovery event at Seattle Children’s Research Institute on Tuesday, Kamisetty, Sangani and other panelists shared their thoughts on Seattle’s leadership as well as discussions of the progress and challenges in the field.
The ability to use AI to create new proteins and screen them for specific applications has led to “a pace of innovation that I just don’t think we’ve ever seen before,” said panelist Ken Horenstein, founder and partner of Pack Ventures, which funds UW-related startups.
In a separate interview with GeekWire, Leek cautioned that AI tools aren’t meant to replace wet lab research with actual patients, cells and proteins but serve to support that bench work.
The Synthesize Bio platform, for example, can help plan lab experiments and provide incremental feedback as the science is underway, allowing researchers to redirect their efforts before wasting time and resources on dead ends.
“Now, I can just generate experiments from the future and see what those experiments will look like, and then use that information to design a real experiment that is done in a lab that is much more likely to be successful,” Leek said.
The panelists at the Seattle Children’s event also called out the time and cost savings from using AI tools for scientific literature searches, grant writing and managerial operations such as HR work.
And while there’s excitement about creating new drugs, panelist Jason Price, a Seattle Children’s researcher, warned that there are still big hurdles to solve. That includes the potential for patients’ immune systems to attack AI-created drugs as unrecognizable, foreign invaders — a response called immunogenicity.
“It’s important that we totally push this [AI research] as fast as possible. This is going to revolutionize everything — it already is,” Price said. “But one of the biggest things that I think about is immunogenicity risk.”
But Seattle, perhaps, is the best place to tackle that problem.
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