Baker lab designs antibodies from scratch with atomic accuracy using RFdiffusion
Result confirmed
The takeaway
In Nature (Nov 2025) the Baker lab reported de novo design of VHH nanobodies, scFvs and full antibodies against chosen epitopes.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Targets included influenza HA and C. difficile toxin TcdB; cryo-EM matched designs at atomic level
- Chai-2 (bioRxiv, Jul 2025): ~16% de novo antibody hit rate; binders for ~50% of 52 targets with ≤20 designs each (preprint)
What happened
After years of designing small binders, AI protein design reached antibodies, the most important class of biologic drugs.
Why it matters
Computational antibody design could replace months of animal immunisation and library screening in drug discovery.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 2 primary, 1 press
Primary
- Atomically accurate de novo design of antibodies with RFdiffusion (Nature)nature.com, paper
- Chai-2 zero-shot antibody design (bioRxiv)biorxiv.org, paper
Press
Changes
- Filed