Chinese tech giant Baidu’s new AI algorithm boosts COVID-19 mRNA vaccine antibody response significantly

(JW Insights) May 5 -- A team of researchers from Baidu Research, an AI company based in Beijing, has developed an AI algorithm that can rapidly design highly stable COVID-19 mRNA vaccine sequences that were previously unattainable, said the company on May 3.

The algorithm, named LinearDesign, represents a major leap in both stability and efficacy for vaccine sequences, achieving a 128-fold increase in the COVID-19 vaccine’s antibody response.

“This research can apply mRNA medicine encoding to a wider range of therapeutic proteins, such as monoclonal antibodies and anti-cancer drugs, promising broad applications and far-reaching impact,” said Dr. He Zhang, Staff Software Engineer at Baidu Research.

Through a collaboration with Oregon State University, StemiRNA Therapeutics, and the University of Rochester Medical Center, the study “Algorithm for Optimized mRNA Design Improves Stability and Immunogenicity” appeared in the scientific journal Nature on May 2 through Accelerated Article Preview (AAP). This marks the first time a Chinese tech company has been credited as the first affiliation on a paper published in Nature.

Though NLP and biology may at first glance appear unrelated, the two fields share strong mathematical connections. In human language, a sentence consists of a word sequence and an underlying syntactic tree with noun and verb phrases, which together convey meaning. Likewise, an RNA strand has a nucleotide sequence and an associated secondary structure based on its folding pattern, according to Baidu.

In a head-to-head comparison, the sequences designed by LinearDesign exhibited significantly improved results compared to existing vaccine sequences.

Baidu has created a biocomputing platform based on PaddlePaddle called PaddleHelix, which encompasses the ERNIE-Biocomputing Big Models, including LinearDesign.

This platform explores the application of AI in various fields, such as small molecules, proteins/peptides, and RNA, offering a novel research paradigm for AI in life sciences.

Moving forward, Baidu will continue to explore AI applications in life sciences, broadening the scope and depth of inclusive technology, and championing the health and well-being of all humanity, according to the report from Baidu.

(Gao J)