Nabla Bio expects human trials of AI-designed antibody drugs within two years

Nabla Bio, a Massachusetts-based biotech company backed by OpenAI, is preparing to take AI-designed antibodies from the lab into human bodies. The company’s latest model, JAM-2, has produced antibody candidates with binding affinities that match or beat conventional therapies, putting it on track for first-in-human trials within the next year or two. What JAM-2 actually does Nabla’s JAM-2 model generated antibody candidates against 26 different targets. For nearly half of those targets, the candidates achieved picomolar to single-digit nanomolar affinities. More than 50% of the candidates met developability criteria without any optimization. JAM-2 achieved up to an 11% success rate for direct on-cell binding against GPCRs. GPCRs are the target class for roughly a third of all FDA-approved drugs, yet designing new antibodies against them has historically been a grind. Some of the AI-generated candidates demonstrated the ability to activate cellular signaling pathways, a capability that opens the door to agonist therapies where the drug needs to turn something on, not just block it. The model also showed strong epitope precision, routinely hitting 30-70% of user-defined epitopes, mea...