🔬The BioAI Phase Shift - Matthew McPartlon & Neil Patil, Chai Discovery

**Neil Patil** (0:00)
It looks a lot less like a, you know, a chat CPT, and a lot more like Autodesk or SolidWorks or Figma, you know, if you've used those things, where you can kind of load up your molecule. There's this almost like Photoshop-esque, like, design suite. You have this equivalent of a paint tool to kind of paint your epitope. You have this equivalent of a content-aware fill tool to kind of get your binders generated from Chai. And I think to add to that, right, you had this notion of target discovery and hit discovery and optimization, where each of these has a gate that takes a few months to a few years, is this very like waterfall model, right, where the cost of trying things and getting things early is very expensive. But I think to what Matt's saying, right, if you start to get in a regime where you can have models give you really promising candidates, you can start to make that look a lot more like a loop, right? It's akin to like becoming more agile in software development. But now the next problem is like agonists, right? Like how do you reliably one-shot hitting a switch like on a cell, right? Or buy specifics or ADCs, right? Do you think this levels of abstraction that we're going to have to climb with the product as like the models get better? If you have like these really good primitives for structure prediction and binding and design, and you can kind of compose them, then you can start to just like grow into like the outer loop of science.

**Brandon** (1:15)
Welcome to Latent Space, AI for Science. I'm Brandon. I build RA Therapeutics at Atomic AI. I'm joined by my co-host, RJ Hanaki, CTO and co-founder of Mirroromics. It's a pleasure to have with us in the studio today, Matt McPartlon and Neil Patil of Chai Discovery. Chai is a protein design startup, which is about two and a half years old and has made quite a splash in those few years.
They have several very exciting announcements that I think they'll tell us about today. But yeah, to get started, could you two give us a bit about your background and what you do at Chai?

**Matt McPartlon** (1:46)
Yeah. Thank you very much for having us. We're super excited to talk about Chai today. I'm Matt McPartlon. I'm one of the co-founders at Chai.
My background is in AI biology related stuff during my PhD.
I actually started my PhD in theoretical computer science and then transitioned to this later. Yeah, I've been doing this stuff now for about eight years and I came into the field at an interesting time where protein structure prediction was just starting to see signs of life. So this is like Alpha Fold 1 days and was in the field during Alpha Fold 2 and got to see a lot of the interesting developments at that time. So yeah, I'd always been pretty interested in applying this stuff in the real world and Chai was just a perfect opportunity to do that.

**Neil Patil** (2:29)
And I'm Neil Patil. I help lead a platform and product here at Chai. So a lot of the stuff around infrastructure to train models, serve them and then the productization piece, the design suite that lets you use the models. I have a more meandering path.
So I got into programming 15 years ago, making apps in the app store, got really addicted to the dopamine hits you get from that.
And then actually got nerd sniped by robotics and worked on that for a bit. Self-driving cars in 2018, 2019, got really jaded and was like, I don't want to touch hardware for a while. I ended up switching and joining a SaaS company called Vanta, one of the first employees there and grew with it. Started my own security company afterwards. Got a few years into that and I was like, you know what? Adams are kind of cool. I want to work on something a little more meaningful. And so I joined Chai about a year ago, right after Chai2 was announced to help with a lot of the platform and commercialization pieces.

**RJ Honicky** (3:21)
Awesome. It's like the five stages of grief or something. Yeah.

**Neil Patil** (3:25)
We're at acceptance.

**RJ Honicky** (3:27)
Awesome.
You have these, I think, four now big partnerships and raised a whole bunch of money. Can you tell us a little bit about those partnerships? And then what I really want to know is, what are you telling investors and customers that is so compelling that they're willing to do these big deals?

**Matt McPartlon** (3:45)
Yeah. So we've been very fortunate to partner first with Eli Lily and then with Pfizer, Novartis, and our GenX.