Metagenomi taps Amazon’s custom chips to develop gene-editing tools 

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Biotech firm Metagenomi said it is using artificial intelligence chips from Amazon.com’s cloud computing unit to power some of its work in developing gene-editing technologies.

The work represents one of the first major uses of Amazon Web Services chips beyond chatbots and other products powered by large language models, with Metagenomi saying AWS’s Inferentia chips had proven far more cost-effective than products from rivals like Nvidia.

Emeryville, California-based firm Metagenomi is one of a number of companies working to develop tools to inject genetic material into the human body where it can edit genes to treat diseases.

To do that, Metagenomi sifts through the natural world looking for proteins that might help with the challenge of precisely delivering a treatment to any gene in any cell of the human body. When it finds one that looks close, it uses AI to generate many similar examples to find just the right ones.

“So 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,” Chris Brown, head of discovery for Metagenomi.

“Unless you cast a broad enough net in the beginning, you actually just miss what can be the most important discoveries and systems entirely,” he added.

The Inferentia chips – which were introduced in 2019 to power AI features for Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant – were able to do the same job as rival chips at roughly half the price, Brown said.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)