Profluent, GEMMABio, and ARPA-H ‘s 160 Million Base Editor Moonshot: Why the AI-Designed Editor Was Never the Bottleneck and the FDA’s Plausible Mechanism Pathway Is the Real Bet

ARPA-H just put $160M behind seven teams to advance personalized genetic medicines. The GEMMABio/Profluent team grabbed the headlines. But the AI-designed editor is almost certainly not the most important part of this story. A thread.

Profluent trained protein language models on 115B+ sequences and built a library of base editors that can, in theory, cov…