An Australian female-led and founded startup has made a splash in San Francisco this week, unveiling a world-first computer model of a human protein as it exists in the human body.
The milestone confirms that protein behaviour can be calculated directly from physics, which has important implications for modern medicine development.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OmnigeniQ, Jordana Blackman (pictured above, left) presented the discovery at the Biotech Showcase in San Francisco.
“What this unlocks for modern medicine is profound,” Blackman said.
“If you know the true, dynamic structure of a protein, you can design a drug that engages it with far higher specificity. That means fewer off target effects, fewer failed candidates, and a faster path to viable therapies.”
Blackman says OmnigeniQ’s work in this space will have a significant impact on drug development.
“The industry spends billions each year on molecules that fail because their target wasn’t fully understood,” she said.
“Physics accurate protein computation changes that equation and gives us the ability to completely overturn the process of drug development.”
The all-female team at OmnigeniQ is on a mission to create the world’s first holographic twin of the human body. This would be a living, physics-accurate digital replica that makes medicine preventative, predictive, and precise.
The breakthrough used OmnigeniQ’s physics-based Deterministic Intelligence model. It shows proteins in their native, hydrated, dynamic form.
Deterministic Intelligence is a new class of artificial intelligence designed to compute biology from physics, rather than learning patterns from data.
OmnigeniQ’s co-founder and Chief Science Officer, Tiffanwy Klippel-Cooper (pictured above, right,) developed the company’s game-changing approach.
“Proteins have always been treated as objects to be imaged or inferred, rather than physical systems to be computed,” she explains.
“In reality, a protein’s structure emerges from interacting physical constraints – charge distribution, hydration, field effects, and continuous motion.
“I designed the computational model to let those constraints resolve the structure deterministically. Computing CDK5 from first principles shows that native protein conformations are not something we have to guess or approximate – they are a direct consequence of physics.”
OmnigeniQ was co-founded by Tiff Klippel-Cooper and Jordana Blackman, who first met in 2024.
Klippel-Cooper is a multi-disciplinary scientist with degrees across genetics, biological science, medical science, pathology and archaeology. Her lived experience with a severe connective tissue disorder has shaped her determination to build new scientific tools.