AI, meet antibodies. Inside EVQLV’s ‘ChatGPT moment for biology’ – Refresh Miami
What comes to mind when you think about AI? Maybe chatbots. Art generators. Virtual assistants like Amazon Alexa.
For Andrew Satz, AI is all about antibodies. Specifically, how artificial intelligence can help design them faster, cheaper, and better than ever before.
Satz, co-founder and CEO of Miami-based biotech company EVQLV, and CTO and technical co-founder Brett Averso have spent the last five years building toward what Satz calls a “ChatGPT moment for biology.”
With the launch of Abtique, EVQLV is opening up access to AI-designed molecules for the first time. This kind of technology used to require complex software, deep scientific knowledge, and tens of millions of dollars in upfront costs.
“It’s the only way I know of that you can buy AI-designed molecules online,” Satz told Refresh Miami. “You can use ChatGPT to generate words or DALL·E to generate images – but there hasn’t been anywhere you could go to get molecules. Until now.”
The idea behind Abtique is radical in its simplicity: Democratize the process of drug discovery. Through a streamlined web interface, scientists can generate AI-designed antibodies for a fraction of previous costs (starting at under $10,000) and with no specialized coding or infrastructure needed. Satz said the initial customers are researchers focused on diseases like cancer, autoimmune disorders, and viruses, but the long-term vision is far broader.
“Our goal is to make this accessible to anyone who wants to work on a disease,” he said. “We want to make it easy for anyone, anywhere, to start a biotech.”
Abtique is powered by EVQLV’s proprietary HyperBind2 platform, which Satz describes as the engine behind the system. HyperBind2 can rank tens of millions of antibody-target pairs in less than 48 hours – a major leap compared to the few hundred pairs that traditional methods can process in the same time frame. In one experiment, more than 10% of AI-designed antibodies hit a difficult target and delivered therapeutic-grade performance, compared to typical hit rates below 1%.
That kind of performance has attracted the attention of major players. Over the past two years, EVQLV has partnered with more than 20 global biopharma companies, delivering over 3,500 AI-designed antibody sequences into drug development pipelines. Satz said 48 independent lab studies have validated the platform’s effectiveness.
“Most of what’s been called AI-designed antibodies to date hasn’t really been validated,” he said. “Our technology has been tested and proven by independent labs, not by us, but by our customers. That’s a big deal.”
The company’s latest paper, set to be published alongside the Abtique launch, details these findings and includes a GitHub repository that allows other scientists to examine and verify parts of the model.
This focus on openness marks a shift from the biotech industry’s traditional playbook, where breakthroughs are often locked behind closed doors or multi-million-dollar licensing deals.
“If you wanted to do what we do, you used to need to be a machine learning engineer and a molecular biologist, or have the budget of a pharma giant,” Satz said. “Now, anyone can log on, start a project, and get results in minutes.”
EVQLV’s approach is also a business bet: by productizing its core technology, the company is moving beyond service-based biotech and toward a scalable model – something Satz calls “building a business, not a venture.”
“We’ve spent five years getting to this point,” he said. “This has always been the dream: to build the Amazon for AI-designed antibodies.”
If Satz is right, this could mark the start of something big: a world where designing life-saving therapies is as simple as typing a few prompts into a browser.
Pictured above: Andrew Satz, co-founder and CEO of EVQLV, at right, with CTO and technical co-founder Brett Averso.
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