OpenProtein.AI and Boehringer Ingelheim advance AI-driven antibody discovery
Boehringer Ingelheim expands its collaboration with OpenProtein.AI following successful initial deployment, co-developing integrated workflows for next-generation therapeutic development
10 Apr 2026Industry news
OpenProtein.AI has announced an expansion of its partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim to co-develop specialized antibody discovery and optimization workflows. The collaboration will integrate OpenProtein.AI's foundation models and cloud platform directly into Boehringer Ingelheim's therapeutic development processes, establishing an end-to-end AI-driven approach to antibody engineering.
The shift toward AI-enabled antibody engineering is transforming drug discovery by accelerating the identification of high-quality candidates for diseases with high unmet patient need like cancer and autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. Following a successful deployment in 2025, Boehringer Ingelheim is broadening the application of OpenProtein.AI's platform and investing in custom antibody-focused capabilities.
Integrated AI for therapeutic development
The partnership will develop antibody-specific tools within OpenProtein.AI's platform, enabling scientists to analyze large-scale sequence datasets, predict binding characteristics, design optimized variants using generative AI, and train custom models directly on their proprietary functional assay data.
All capabilities will be accessible through OpenProtein.AI's user-friendly web interface and programmatic APIs, creating a seamless closed loop between computational prediction and experimental validation in Boehringer Ingelheim's design-build-test cycles.
A validated AI-driven platform for protein engineering
OpenProtein.AI's SaaS platform serves pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies of all sizes, from start ups to global enterprises. The company's PoET (Protein Evolutionary Transformer) foundation models provide best-in-class zero-shot predictions, while the platform's integrated suite of tools enables de novo protein design, combinatorial sequence optimization, function and structure prediction, and custom AI model training.
The platform is designed to learn continuously from customers' and partners' functional assay data, creating a virtuous cycle where each round of experimental testing improves subsequent computational predictions. This closed-loop approach dramatically accelerates the optimization of therapeutic candidates across diverse protein modalities, including antibodies, enzymes, and more.
"We built OpenProtein.AI to be a true partner in drug discovery, not just a prediction tool, but an integrated platform that becomes smarter as it works alongside experimental teams," added Tristan Bepler. "Our collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim represents the future of biopharma R&D: accelerating drug discovery through human-AI collaboration."