Baker Lab and NVIDIA Release Open-Source Protein Design Model RFD4-Proteina

After roughly a year of collaboration, NVIDIA and the University of Washington's David Baker lab (Institute for Protein Design, a Nobel laureate team) jointly released the open-source de novo protein design model RFD4-Proteina at GTC Berlin on October 21, open-sourced under a BSD license (m9 mentioned BSD-3). The model combines UW's RFdiffusion with the lineage of NVIDIA Health's Proteina models and is regarded as a major advance in protein design.

Confirmed

• The model was co-developed by NVIDIA's BioNeMo / GenAIR / Health teams and UW's Institute for Protein Design; the paper is titled "Biomolecular design through latent reasoning…"
• A single model starts from a shared latent space and jointly generates protein sequences and all-atom structures, unifying design tasks spanning proteins, enzymes, binders, antibodies, peptides, and DNA binding
• The preprint reports surpassing evaluated baselines in both computational design success rate and generation throughput across four benchmark suites: protein binding, small-molecule binding, enzyme scaffolds, and DNA binding
• Official numbers: on 24 binding targets, 76.40 designs passed per GPU hour, versus only about 13 for the next-best method
• Available day-0 via the Tamarind platform through the NVIDIA Health team, and also accessible via Amazon Bedrock (m5)
• The official demo includes generating binding proteins around hotspot residues of the PD-L1 target

Why it matters

• Merging the RFdiffusion and Proteina lineages into a single model covers the full spectrum of protein design tasks, simplifying workflows that previously required multiple specialized models
• The high throughput (dozens of approved designs per GPU hour) can significantly shorten the path from candidate molecules to lab validation, accelerating drug and therapeutic development
• Fully open-sourced under a BSD license, lowering barriers for both academia and industry; vendors like Databricks also covered the release on launch day

2026-10-21 ~ 2026-10-21 · 31 related posts

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• NVIDIA and David Baker's lab open-source RFD4-Proteina protein design model — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• Baker Lab and NVIDIA launch de novo protein design model RFD4-Proteina — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• NVIDIA and UW's open-source RFD4-Proteina designs antibodies, enzymes and peptides in one model — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• RFD4-Proteina: one open model for protein sequence and all-atom design, 76 passing designs per GPU-hour — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• RFD4-Proteina beats baselines on design success rate across four benchmarks — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• NVIDIA and UW's Institute for Protein Design release open protein design model RFD4-Proteina — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• IPD and NVIDIA release RFD4-Proteina, a generative model spanning proteins, DNA and RNA — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• [source] Diffusers merges RFD4-Proteína, a protein design flow-matching model from Baker Lab and NVIDIA — RisingSayak · 2026-10-21
• [source] NVIDIA details RFD4-Proteina: reward-guided inference-time search speeds protein design 3.8x — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
• [source] First protein design model RFD4-Proteina merges into Diffusers — RisingSayak · 2026-10-21
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• RFD4-Proteina launches as free NVIDIA NIM microservice for protein design — AllThingsApx · 2026-10-21
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