In a laboratory near downtown Seattle on the shores of Lake Union, Hetu Kamisetty is helping build what he says is the biotech company of the future.
If talent, money and novel technology are any indication, he and his colleagues have a good shot at it.
Kamisetty heads the Seattle location of Xaira Therapeutics, an AI-focused startup launched in April with more $1 billion from investors.
The lab is populated by researchers skimmed from the nearby Institute for Protein Design, the lauded University of Washington research hub and spinout machine.
The founding members of Xaira’s molecule design and AI team, which Kamisetty leads, are all IPD alums.
Nathaniel Bennett helped develop RFDiffusion, an AI-powered tool from the IPD used to design proteins with drug-like properties. Justas Dauparas, a soft-spoken soccer-playing Lithuanian, is one of the scientists behind another IPD model, ProteinMPNN. Buwei Huang is a recent IPD graduate student and Philip Leung is a former postdoc.
Xaira was founded with the aim of building on IPD models like RFDiffusion and ProteinMPNN, and going beyond them to develop new therapeutics based on proteins and other molecules. Xaira’s scientists integrate molecular design with other AI-based approaches to model biology and drug development across the drug development pipeline.
