Chris Bahl saw the writ­ing on the wall for his new AI start­up in the fi­nal weeks of 2022: Mol­e­cules would mat­ter more than mod­els.

A pair of preprints had just come out, both show­ing dif­fu­sion mod­els that could gen­er­ate not just im­ages, but pro­teins. Bahl, then the chief sci­en­tist of his start­up AI Pro­teins, re­al­ized that the still-young AI bio sec­tor was about to change.

He con­clud­ed that the race to build lead­ing AI pro­tein mod­els was too com­modi­tized, es­pe­cial­ly as these cut­ting-edge mod­els called RFd­if­fu­sion and Chro­ma be­came freely avail­able as open-source tech­nol­o­gy. Bahl stopped his team’s ef­forts on build­ing gen­er­al-pur­pose pro­tein mod­els, shift­ing fo­cus to nar­row­er AI ap­pli­ca­tions for oth­er drug de­vel­op­ment tasks.

The chal­leng­ing and com­pet­i­tive field of gene in­ser­tion has an­oth­er well-fund­ed con­tender.

Ad­di­tion Ther­a­peu­tics, a start­up based on re­search from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, has raised $106.5 mil­lion for a new way to in­stall ther­a­peu­tic genes in the hu­man genome.

Ad­di­tion’s tech­nol­o­gy is cen­tered on retro­trans­posons, or "jump­ing genes." These mo­bile mol­e­cules hide in and hop around un­der­stud­ied parts of genomes some­times de­rid­ed as "junk" DNA. But where for­mer gen­er­a­tions of sci­en­tists saw trash, Ad­di­tion and oth­er emerg­ing com­pa­nies see trea­sure.

By har­ness­ing jump­ing genes, Ad­di­tion hopes to safe­ly in­te­grate en­tire genes in­to safe spots in the hu­man genome. And since the sys­tem can be for­mu­lat­ed en­tire­ly as RNA and pack­aged in lipid nanopar­ti­cles, it could pro­vide a cheap­er, more con­ve­nient and pos­si­bly safer al­ter­na­tive to ex­ist­ing, vi­ral-de­liv­ered gene ther­a­pies.

The End­points Win­ners and Losers list is back — and we're bring­ing it to Post-Hoc Live on Thurs­day (that's to­mor­row) at 12 p.m. ET.

The list is our now-an­nu­al tra­di­tion, track­ing who was up and who was down in bio­phar­ma and health tech, and we've de­bat­ed our picks, checked our list twice, and on Thurs­day you'll find out who was naughty or nice.

To tune in­to the show, you can join us on YouTube, or set a cal­en­dar re­minder for when we go live.

We’ll give you a peek at the rig­or­ous de­bate that hap­pened be­hind the scenes, and an in­side look at the se­lec­tions that didn’t quite make the fi­nal list. Have any win­ners or losers of your own? Send your picks to postho­clive@end­pointsnews.com and we might just de­bate them on the show.