Amazon (AMZN) has come out on top of rivals such as Nvidia (NVDA) when it comes to utilizing AI to fight diseases. However, it wasn’t enough to prevent shares in biotech firm Metagenomi (MGX) and new Amazon partner diving 7% today.
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Faster and Cheaper
Metagenomi said it had replaced Nvidia chips with those from Amazon.com’s cloud computing unit to power some of the work it is doing in developing gene-editing technologies.
The move to start using AWS’s Inferentia 2 accelerators marks one of the first major uses of these chips beyond chatbots and other products such as voice assistant Alexa, powered by large language models. Indeed, Metagenomi said AWS’s Inferentia chips had proven to be far quicker and 56% more cost-effective than Nvidia.
Founded in 2018, Metagenomi is using a Nobel prize-winning approach developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier called CRISPR, which allows for the targeted editing of gene sequences.
Despite the promise, it has done little to shift its share price this year falling 20%,- see above.
AI Boost
Metagenomi looks to inject genetic material into the human body to help it edit genes to treat diseases.
That material can come through the natural world via proteins. When a company like Metagenomi finds one that looks like it could be the perfect way to deliver a treatment to any gene in any cell of the human body, it uses AI to generate a number of other examples.
“Gene editing is a new therapeutic modality aimed at treating disease by addressing the cause of disease at the genetic level. So rather than treating the symptoms, actually going after a cure,” said Chris Brown, VP of discovery at Metagenomi. “We did this impressive thing where we generated over a million different proteins from this rare class of enzyme that we use for doing gene editing. And in that case, it was really a clear cost advantage for using the Inferentia platform.”
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