Quarthex

Habitual line-stepper.
I no longer use Twitter because of the dumbass in charge. Find me on Bluesky: @quarthex.bsky.social

[Ben Birnbaum @benbirnbaum]

Today @inductive_bio is launching Beacon-2, which can predict human dose directly from chemical structure.

A dirty secret of AI for drug discovery is that most systems optimize the wrong reward, making them near useless in practice. Human dose is the right reward – it’s what every drug program is already optimizing. Making it computable will unlock the real-world impact of agentic drug discovery.

Beacon-2 builds on our Beacon-1 models that beat 750+ competitors to win all three OpenADMET blind challenges. Whereas Beacon-1 provided a suite of models for individual molecular properties, Beacon-2 is a single system that predicts human dose end-to-end.

It has three configurable modules: an ADMET-PK foundation model, a potency module that can use our fine-tunable co-folding affinity model or physics-based methods like FEP, and a PK/PD model with physiologically-informed mechanistic models of pharmacokinetics.

We share validation results from Beacon-2 in a blog we are releasing today. We show that across 20 real-world drug programs running through Inductive, dose predictions from Beacon-2 agree with those from experimental data with a Spearman’s ρ of 0.61. And in a similar study on 325 publicly available compounds from the ExpansionRx OpenADMET competition, we show a Spearman ρ of 0.79.

As a proof-of-concept, we gave Beacon-2 to Indy, our medicinal chemistry agent, which used it over 5 autonomous design cycles on a recently disclosed SARS-CoV-2 program to cut predicted human dose 17x, which can be the difference between a drug program that gets killed and that makes it to clinical trials.

We compared the compounds that Indy designed using Beacon-2 against compounds from an optimization loop that used a potency-only reward function. The Beacon-2 compounds were favorable across three independent measures: they were preferred by chemists in blinded comparisons 87% of the time; were more druglike according to QED; and had a lower projected dose when computed by alternate methods relying on in vivo rat models and allometric scaling. Based on these encouraging results, we are now running prospective studies where compounds optimized by Beacon-2 will be validated in the lab.

Read the full post here: https://t.co/nVgAinJ9nu

At Inductive, our long-term goal is to build superhuman chemical intelligence, and by completing the reward function for autonomous drug discovery, Beacon-2 is an exciting step toward that goal.

Reach out if you’d like to get involved.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

This will be my final post on Twitter. You can find me on Bluesky under the same username.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@GovRonDeSantis Florida ranks 51st out of all 50 states and DC in gas cooking appliance popularity: https://t.co/j1EOeHg1Lc

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@AtlRey @CollinRugg Elizabeth Warren isn’t a career politician

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

@lexfridman @elonmusk Just the opposite. You are presuming there will be a balance in perspective among blue checks. I would bet against that. My guess is the blue checks lean pro-elon and will use the impact of blocks, mutes and likes to create intentional echo chambers that reflect Elon’s positions

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@elonmusk I voted 60 times :)

[Chris Hayes @chrislhayes]

Would absolutely read a #TwitterFiles on what’s going on right now!

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@TheRealHoarse Doesn’t add up because he tried to get out of the Twitter deal

[Chris Hayes @chrislhayes]

I'm desperately bored of Elon news cycles but this obviously pretextual, post-hoc change to policies to protect his own private jet info is hilarious and makes the stuff exposed in the Twitter Files look like an absolute model of considered, deliberative policy-making.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@elonmusk @omnihedge Ah, yes, the unhinged leftists who attended the Dave Chappelle comedy show.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@boring_as_heck I know this is the least weird thing about it but it also bothers me that it doesn’t just say “innovation is in my core” or “innovation is in my DNA.”

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@TeamThirstTrap Turner had a strong east coast preference and maybe Senga wasn’t getting the opt out from SD?

[David Roth @david_j_roth]

Even before this Elon was a competitor for one of the all-time wackest posters on this site. A sweaty reply-guy for the worst accounts on here, a joke-thief and a bore, and a relentless, charmless ROFL emoji donkey in every facet. At this point he's clearly the worst poster ever.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@mlbrums

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

Elon Musk's inconsistencies, a thread:

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@BradanFeasaDubh @lionel_trolling You’ve got it exactly right. They have preconceived notions and they won’t be reading a word of if.

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@KariLake Same company https://t.co/IuABURbZfH

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@andrew_n_carr The Trojan Horse is fictional

[Quarthex @Quarthex]

@metsnewsrumors @SNY_Mets @SNYtv That's David Robertson.