The New Era of AI-Powered Protein Design | César Ramírez-Sarmiento | TED

My name is César Ramirez-Sarmiento. I'm based in Santiago, Chile. I'm a protein engineer and designer. Proteins are macromolecules which are composed of amino acids. They are made of 20 different types represented by letters. So you can imagine an alphabet of amino acids, and you can imagine that these amino acids are connected to each other like beads on a string. And so that allows for them to come together in different geometries. And so they get a shape, they get a three-dimensional structure that allows for them to dictate their functions. We have many different proteins with many different shapes that actually perform different biological functions in cells. They allow us to digest food, transport ions for electrical signals to go through neurons. They allow for the expression of different genes that regulate how our cells or how our body responds. Proteins are the workhorse of cells. They are like a toolbox for cells to do whatever they have to do. Proteins have been evolving for millions of years for performing functions that are important for cellular life. They have been perfected by nature to do what they do now. But when it comes to problems that are important for humankind, like plastic contamination, carbon dioxide, problems in health, we want to make them better. We just don't have a thousand years to wait for it. We have to do it now. Protein engineering, in short, it's asking yourself if you can change the amino acid composition of your protein. And by doing so, if you can get improvements in some properties of that protein. We can use different tools for that, we can use experimental approaches, we can use computational approaches. But overall what they're doing is that they are changing this sequence of amino acids that compose proteins in order to improve these properties. This is like giving nature a little push. And that's where the use of artificial intelligence comes in. In the last five years, we have seen breakthroughs in artificial intelligence for designing proteins that we never imagined. They allow us for designing new protein structures, new protein shapes that encode bespoke functions for solving all types of problems. Before the advent of AI, the success rate for protein design was about one percent or less, which means if you created 100 proteins with 100 different sequences, maybe one of them will work. Now, with the advent of AI, we see about 10 to 20 percent. So if you now take your 100 sequences that you generated in the computer, about 20 of them will actually have the desired activity, and some of them will be actually better than the input sequences of the protein of interest that you're working with. When I was a kid, I was interested in arts because it was allowing for a space for creativity. But then when I was in high school, I opted for science because I saw that I could provide much more for the benefit of society by pursuing science instead of arts, in my case. But I think both disciplines are actually playgrounds for creativity. For science, artificial intelligence is another tool for coming up with creative solutions for different problems. My dream future for protein engineering is that we have a strong community of protein engineers and designers in Latin America, so that we can create solutions for problems that are specific to our countries. We are usually not fully aware of the advances of the use of artificial intelligence for protein engineering and design that is happening in other parts of the world. But at the same time, we have many people that are interested in creating new proteins. And so the idea of working in Chile is that we can actually create a critical mass of scientists that can work on these problems. We are actually working on how to educate the next generation of scientists from Latin America on how to use these tools. I always had this belief that we had to come together to try to do something bigger than what we can do as individuals. We can think about other compositions of nature that we haven't seen before. In the case of proteins, we can navigate untapped terrain that nature hasn't explored yet. We can navigate through those landscapes of different protein structures, different protein sequences, and see whether those spaces that contain these protein structures and sequences are actually good for resolving the issues that are the most pressing problems for humankind.