Zifo has announced the launch of its Antibody Engineering application, a cloud-native GenAI platform built on the Snowflake Data Cloud and available on the Snowflake Marketplace.
The app aims to help biopharma companies, research institutions, and contract research organisations design and optimise therapeutic antibodies faster, potentially shortening the timeline for new drug discovery without needing to move data outside of Snowflake.
The development of new antibody-based therapies is traditionally a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. Zifo’s Antibody Engineering app confronts this challenge by integrating AI into a seamless, end-to-end workflow that promises to improve the hit rate for high-affinity therapeutic antibodies.
“We are entering a new era of drug discovery, one where AI and data converge to solve biology’s most complex puzzles,” said Chris McClure, head of solution services for Zifo in North America.
“Zifo Antibody Engineering is more than just a tool; it’s a strategic partner for scientists. By building it as a Snowflake Native App, we’re giving researchers the power to innovate faster, reduce R&D costs, and ultimately bring life-saving therapies to patients sooner. We’ve effectively democratised access to complex AI, removing the need for deep machine learning expertise.”
Leveraging the power and scalability of Snowflake’s platform, including Snowpark Container Services, the application provides a no-code, intuitive interface for scientists and bioinformaticians. Users can fine-tune powerful protein language models like ProtGPT2, RoBERTa, and ESM2 on their proprietary datasets without moving sensitive information outside of their secure Snowflake environment. The platform facilitates the entire discovery pipeline, from generating novel antibody sequences to predicting their 3D structures and analyzing key regions.
“Zifo Antibody Engineering, combined with Snowflake’s infrastructure, offers life sciences a cutting-edge tool for research development,” said Lisa Arbogast, industry principal for healthcare and life sciences ecosystem at Snowflake.
“Together, we enable use of data to its fullest potential while helping customers adhere to high standards of security and compliance.”
The value of Zifo’s Antibody Engineering platform extends across the life sciences ecosystem:
Biopharma R&D teams: Streamline antibody discovery by generating novel sequences and predicting binding affinities faster than traditional methods.
CDMOs and CROs: Offer AI-powered protein engineering as a service to clients developing therapeutic antibodies.
Academic and research institutions: Leverage advanced protein modeling tools to push the boundaries of computational biology and structural bioinformatics.
Clinical and preclinical development: Validate AI-generated antibodies with experimental data, expediting lead selection.
The architecture is designed for high-performance AI workloads, handling massive datasets and multi-modal inputs within Snowflake’s managed environment. After fine-tuning models, users can generate new antibody sequences, visualize their 3D protein structures, download PDB files, and review analysis of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs).
Jim Cornall is editor of Deeptech Digest and publisher at Ayr Coastal Media. He is an award-winning writer, editor, photographer, broadcaster, designer and author. Contact Jim here.
