OpenProtein.AI, a New York-based provider of AI-driven protein engineering software, and Boehringer Ingelheim, the privately held German pharmaceutical company, announced an expansion of their existing collaboration to co-develop antibody discovery and optimization workflows. The partnership builds on an initial deployment completed in 2025 and deepens the integration of OpenProtein.AI’s platform into Boehringer Ingelheim’s therapeutic development infrastructure. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The expanded arrangement centers on AI antibody discovery capabilities, with the two organizations working to embed OpenProtein.AI’s foundation models and cloud-based platform directly into Boehringer Ingelheim’s design-build-test cycles. No specific drug candidates are named in the collaboration; the deal operates at the platform level, providing computational infrastructure intended to accelerate the identification and optimization of antibody therapeutics. Therapeutic areas of focus were not specified in the announcement, though the press release references cancer and autoimmune or inflammatory conditions as disease categories with high unmet patient need.
Platform architecture and technical scope
The collaboration will develop antibody-specific tools within OpenProtein.AI’s software-as-a-service platform, which is built around the company’s PoET (Protein Evolutionary Transformer) foundation models. These models provide what the company describes as zero-shot predictions of protein variant fitness, drawing on evolutionary sequence data to estimate which amino acid changes are likely to be tolerated or functionally beneficial without requiring prior experimental data on a specific protein family.
Within the expanded partnership, scientists at Boehringer Ingelheim will use the platform to analyze large-scale antibody sequence datasets, predict binding characteristics, design optimized variants using generative AI, and train custom models on proprietary functional assay data. All capabilities are accessible through OpenProtein.AI’s web interface and programmatic APIs, creating a closed loop between computational prediction and experimental validation.
Boehringer Ingelheim is also investing in the development of custom antibody-focused capabilities within the platform, though the scope and financial terms of that investment were not disclosed.