The Keasling Lab used Cradle to re-engineer plant enzymes for fermentation-based QS-21 vaccine adjuvant production.

QS-21 is harvested from Chilean soap bark trees, and plant enzymes moved into yeast performed orders of magnitude below commercial viability. The lab integrated Cradle's AI into an iterative design-test-retrain loop across multiple enzymes. The page reports variants with strong improvements in catalytic efficiency and processivity in early rounds, notes these are early-stage, and gives no quantitative metrics.

Cradle is an AI protein engineering software company whose platform designs and optimizes proteins, antibodies, enzymes and peptides for biopharma and industry.

This sits in the Design & Stress-Test stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the tools pharma teams use to scope, prototype and benchmark an AI use case before committing to build it — data-catalog, sandbox and evaluation platforms.