- Latent-Y, the first lab-validated drug design agent, is now open to researchers worldwide through the Latent Labs Platform
- Every approved researcher receives a free daily quota of 250 designs, with additional credits available on demand for larger campaigns
- In published results, Latent-Y reached a 67% target-level success rate across nine targets, with binding affinities in the single-digit nanomolar range
- Researchers at UC Davis, LMU University Hospital and the Translational Genomics Research Institute produced lab-validated designs on the Latent Labs Platform, including groups with no prior computational design experience
- Results include de novo designed functional inhibitors of human ion channels, CAR-T cells that killed tumour cells in vitro and are now in animal studies, and high-affinity binders against a conserved malarial target
LONDON & SAN FRANCISCO, July 15, 2026 — Today, Latent Labs launches Latent-Y, its lab-validated drug design agent, to researchers worldwide through the Latent Labs Platform. Any approved researcher can now access Latent-Y for free, with a daily design quota included at no cost. For larger campaigns, researchers can purchase additional design credits on demand.
Latent-Y is an AI agent for drug design. It takes a therapeutic goal, specified in written language or as a scientific publication, and reasons through the design process end to end, delivering lab-ready sequences. It works through the decisions a specialist structural biologist would make, from identifying the right site on the target to selecting and refining candidates against it. The agent can run without intervention, or pause at each stage for researcher review, giving researchers full control over every design decision. In published results, Latent-Y achieved a 67% target-level success rate across nine targets, with binding affinities reaching the single-digit nanomolar range, compressing weeks of expert workflow into hours, a 56x acceleration.
Ahead of today's launch, the Latent Labs Platform was made available to a cohort of academic research groups, spanning ion channel structural biology, cancer immunotherapy and infectious disease, and including labs with no prior computational design experience. At UC Davis, Prof. Vladimir Yarov-Yarovoy's group designed nanobodies from scratch against a human ion channel. Of five taken into the lab, four blocked the channel's electrical current, and the most potent did so at very low concentrations (an IC50 of 30 nM), a potency usually reached only after rounds of laboratory refinement, but achieved here on the first attempt. At LMU University Hospital, Dr Daria Briukhovetska's group built designed binders into CAR-T cells that efficiently killed tumour cells in vitro and have since moved to animal studies. At the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Prof. John Altin's lab confirmed dozens of high-affinity binders against a conserved site on a malaria parasite protein, one the parasite cannot mutate away without losing its ability to cause severe disease.
Latent-Y is the reasoning and natural-language interface to the Latent Labs Platform, the same models and tools that produced the results above. It runs entirely in the browser, with no infrastructure to set up and no pipelines to maintain, so researchers can start designing immediately and at scale. For scientific teams, this means a single researcher can pursue targets that would otherwise sit out of reach.
To mark the launch, Latent Labs will host a live demonstration and scientific presentation in London, on July 15 2026. Attendees will see Latent-Y run a live design campaign and hear results from the beta program directly from the research teams. The evening will conclude with a panel discussion on “Frontier protein design, now in every researcher’s hands”, featuring the former CEO of Merck KgaA, Stefan Oschmann. Registration is open at www.luma.com/latent-y-launch.
"We built Latent-Y to be a force multiplier for researchers. Just as coding agents are accelerating software development, Latent-Y accelerates drug development: one person running dozens of design campaigns in parallel, each progressing with expert-level biological reasoning. Researchers can now design antibodies, nanobodies and macrocycles at unprecedented scale, all from a natural language prompt," said Simon Kohl, CEO and founder of Latent Labs.
Researchers own the sequences they generate, and Latent Labs does not train on user data or outputs. Access is available at platform.latentlabs.com; applicants provide their affiliation and research use case. Commercial partnerships are available through a separate enterprise tier at partnerships@latentlabs.com.