What is SimpleDesign (Apple)?

Protein design is the work of creating new protein molecules with a chosen activity, behavior or purpose. It is hard because a protein's function depends on how its chain of amino acids (the sequence) forms a three-dimensional structure, so the two have to be chosen together. SimpleDesign is a machine-learning model that designs a protein's sequence and its 3D structure jointly, which the authors call codesign. Rather than first compressing the data in a separate training stage, it is trained directly on the data in a single stage, with one objective for sequences and another for structures, and its authors point to uses such as drug discovery and protein engineering. The paper, by Jiarui Lu and colleagues, appears in the Transactions on Machine Learning Research paper index for August 2026.

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