AI designed enzyme parts nature never made — and some tripled the yield of drug-making assembly lines

Many antibiotics and cancer drugs are built by microscopic assembly lines — and their weakest link is a small transport arm that ferries ingredients along the line. At Germany's Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland, Dr Kenan Bozhüyük's team used AI to design 76 new versions of that arm that evolution never tried, built hundreds of variants, and tested them in living cells. Several worked; some tripled production yields, and one was more stable in heat. Published in Nature Communications, the work is a template for designing drug factories rather than just finding them. 'AI does not replace experiments,' Bozhüyük says, 'but it helps us select promising candidates more quickly.'

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation