As the fu­ture of ma­chine learn­ing and AI promis­es to make ma­jor break­throughs in drug de­vel­op­ment, a suite of star­tups is look­ing to scale their own com­pet­ing ro­bot brain trusts. An am­bi­tious start­up out of Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing’s in­cu­ba­tor un­cloaked last year with its own spin in that arms race — and now it’s primed and ready for a ma­jor ex­pan­sion in the com­ing years.

Gen­er­ate Bio­med­i­cines has closed a gi­ant $370 mil­lion Se­ries B from found­ing in­vestor Flag­ship as well as Alas­ka Per­ma­nent Fund, Al­ti­tude Life Sci­ence Ven­tures, ARCH Ven­ture Part­ners, and funds and ac­counts ad­vised by T. Rowe Price As­so­ci­ates, the com­pa­ny said.

Gen­er­ate, which de­buted in late 2020, is Flag­ship’s shot at us­ing ma­chine learn­ing ad­vances to change the game in the de­vel­op­ment of pro­tein ther­a­peu­tics, with the com­pa­ny promis­ing much faster de­vel­op­ment times and dis­cov­ery suc­cess rates. It’s a mod­el be­ing tried else­where from com­pa­nies like Ex­sci­en­tia and In­sil­i­co, but Gen­er­ate sets it­self apart with its fo­cus on pro­tein se­quenc­ing and the goal to pro­duce de no­vo bi­o­log­ics.

Since launch, Gen­er­ate has been hard at work crunch­ing da­ta through its sys­tem in an at­tempt to give it the broad­est pos­si­ble plat­form for dis­cov­ery. Now, the com­pa­ny is ready to great­ly ex­pand its “wet lab” and bi­ol­o­gy ca­pa­bil­i­ties, CEO Mike Nal­ly told End­points News, and that will spell a huge hir­ing spree for the com­pa­ny as well as new cor­po­rate digs in the Somerville, MA area and an­oth­er site in An­dover.

Cur­rent­ly op­er­at­ing with a work­force of around 80, Gen­er­ate is plan­ning to make the quan­tum leap to 500 em­ploy­ees over the course of the next two years while al­so mov­ing in­to two new fa­cil­i­ties in the com­ing weeks and months. The An­dover site will be used to ex­pand the biotech’s range in struc­tur­al bi­ol­o­gy, in­clud­ing a big in­vest­ment in cryo­genic elec­tron mi­croscopy (cryo-EM), a cut­ting-edge tech­nique used to de­ter­mine the struc­ture of pro­teins.

The im­me­di­ate goal is to move past the work of the past two years, pri­mar­i­ly prov­ing Gen­er­ate’s plat­form could pro­duce high­er bind­ing affin­i­ty pro­teins from pre­cur­sor ref­er­ence bi­o­log­ics, in­to the realm of de­vel­op­ing pro­tein drugs from scratch us­ing pro­pri­etary da­ta learn­ing, Gen­er­ate’s chief strat­e­gy and in­no­va­tion of­fi­cer and co-founder Mol­ly Gib­son told End­points.

“Since in­cep­tion, we’ve set out to an­swer this ques­tion whether we can pro­gram pro­teins at the DNA lev­el, and what we’ve done over the past year is take those first in­sights … re­al­ly show that at scale and push pro­grams for­ward,” Gib­son said. “We’ve shown that we’ve been able to make sig­nif­i­cant ad­vances over where we start­ed cre­at­ing these ma­chine learn­ing al­go­rithms us­ing pub­lic da­ta.”

Now, the team said it will be ready to start churn­ing out pre­clin­i­cal can­di­dates by the end of the year with some of those pro­grams ex­pect­ed to hit hu­man tri­als as ear­ly as 2023.

As the clin­ic moves clos­er, the Gen­er­ate team is keep­ing a close eye on the po­ten­tial for strate­gic part­ner­ships giv­en the po­ten­tial breadth of its plat­form’s ca­pa­bil­i­ties. Those strate­gic part­ner­ships, more in the line of sub­stan­tial R&D team-ups, are a key part of the com­pa­ny’s BD strat­e­gy mov­ing for­ward, Nal­ly said, which the com­pa­ny will have to lever­age with its own in-house work.

“The re­al­i­ty is … we can pro­duce far more than we can con­sume so we want to make sure we com­ple­ment our ex­per­tise in pro­tein en­gi­neer­ing with oth­ers’ dis­tinct ca­pa­bil­i­ty in ar­eas like dis­ease-area bi­ol­o­gy, man­u­fac­tur­ing and clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment,” Nal­ly said. “Ul­ti­mate­ly there’s a huge in­vest­ment across biotech and phar­ma in un­der­stand­ing tar­get bi­ol­o­gy so we think if there’s an ap­pro­pri­ate task, this tech­nol­o­gy may be able to ad­dress it in a way that very few oth­er tech­nolo­gies can.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying so hard to politicize the FDA and demonize the federal government that he entered into an alternate universe on Monday evening in describing a recent FDA action to restrict the use of two monoclonal antibody, or mAb, treatments for Covid-19 that don’t work against Omicron.

Without further ado, let’s break down his statement from last night, line by line, adjective by adjective.

Bristol Myers Squibb recently joined 11 of its peer pharma companies in limiting how many contract pharmacies can access certain drugs discounted by a federal program known as 340B.

Bristol Myers is just the latest in a series of high-profile pharma companies moving in their own direction as the Biden administration’s Health Resources and Services Administration struggles to rein in the drug discount program for the neediest Americans.