Apple Unveils SimpleDesign: An End-to-End Protein Co-Design Model Bypassing Latent Discretization

Apple researchers have introduced SimpleDesign, a generative protein design model that co-generates amino acid sequences and 3D structures directly from raw data. Bypassing the multi-stage autoencoders commonly used to produce discrete latent representations, the architecture trains end-to-end on continuous coordinates across over two million protein pairs. While in silico evaluations show competitive accuracy across folding and inverse folding benchmarks, the generated molecules have not yet undergone wet-lab validation.