NVIDIA and Nobel laureate David Baker's lab release open protein design model RFD4-Proteina
AllThingsApx · x · 2026-10-21
NVIDIA and Nobel laureate David Baker's UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design released RFD4-Proteina, an open protein design model, at GTC Berlin.
- Instead of only searching nature's proteins, researchers give molecular requirements and constraints, then generate, score and iteratively refine novel designs—unifying proteins, noncanonical amino acids, sugars, DNA and RNA in a shared latent space with inference-time search.
- Reported results: 10.6% computational success rate on protein binder design benchmarks with 42x BindCraft's throughput; wet-lab validation includes a de novo enzyme for a key step in synthesizing the HIV drug lenacapavir.
- Potential uses span disease-target binders, useful enzymes, diagnostics, and pesticide-degrading enzymes; designs still need lab validation.
- Weights and code are open, available via OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude Science, Hugging Face, Google Cloud, Amazon Bio Discovery, Benchling, Databricks, Nebius and more.
Related event: NVIDIA and Baker Lab Open-Source RFD4-Proteina Protein Design Model(35 posts)→
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