OpenProtein.AI has announced an expansion of its partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim to co-develop specialised antibody discovery and optimisation workflows. The collaboration will integrate OpenProtein.AI’s foundation models and cloud platform directly into Boehringer Ingelheim’s therapeutic development processes, establishing an end-to-end AI-driven approach to antibody engineering.
The shift toward AI-enabled antibody engineering is transforming drug discovery by accelerating the identification of high-quality candidates for diseases with high unmet patient need like cancer and autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. Following a successful deployment in 2025, Boehringer Ingelheim is broadening the application of OpenProtein.AI’s platform and investing in custom antibody-focused capabilities.
“The results from our initial collaboration demonstrate how the OpenProtein.AI platform can fundamentally accelerate protein engineering when integrated seamlessly into existing workflows,” said Tristan Bepler, CEO of OpenProtein.AI.
“This expanded partnership validates our vision of providing biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies with production-ready AI infrastructure that learns from their proprietary data and adapts to their specific development needs.”
The partnership will develop antibody-specific tools within OpenProtein.AI’s platform, enabling scientists to analyse large-scale sequence datasets, predict binding characteristics, design optimised variants using generative AI, and train custom models directly on their proprietary functional assay data. All capabilities will be accessible through OpenProtein.AI’s web interface and programmatic APIs, creating a closed loop between computational prediction and experimental validation in Boehringer Ingelheim’s design-build-test cycles.
“We built OpenProtein.AI to be a true partner in drug discovery, not just a prediction tool, but an integrated platform that becomes smarter as it works alongside experimental teams,” Bepler said.
“Our collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim represents the future of biopharma R&D: accelerating drug discovery through human-AI collaboration.”