Two biotechs say they’re using AI to conjure drugs from scratch. Their documents suggest otherwise

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It was January 2023. Elon Musk owned Twitter, but it wasn’t yet called X. ChatGPT had been released barely six weeks earlier. 

Absci CEO Sean McClain — tall, with short, gelled hair and a beard, the kind of all-American entrepreneur who mowed lawns to buy a video game as a kid but instead bought his first truck — got up on health care’s biggest stage, the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. He pitched the synthetic biology company he had founded in a tiny basement lab in 2011, touting what he considered striking new evidence of Absci’s ability to create brand-new antibodies with artificial intelligence. 

“Absci is the first and only company to design and validate new antibodies with a zero-shot generative AI,” McClain told a room of investors. “We’re doing this all from scratch on a computer. No one has ever done this before. This completely eliminates all the biological discovery technologies that currently exist, and this truly is the future.”