Umberto Lupo
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umbislupo.bsky.social
Umberto Lupo
@umbislupo.bsky.social
Senior AI Scientist at Absci (@abscibio)
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Two exciting openings with us! 🤖🧬🆎🧫💉
- AI Scientist 👉 lnkd.in/eDXHH4E8
- AI Scientist, Drug Creation 👉 lnkd.in/eEvGyaTR

You'll work on antibody sequence/structure design, antibody-antigen co-folding, antibody-antigen binding prediction, physics-based methodologies, and more!

DMs welcome!
🏛️ 🔍 👀

"There are no optical corrections in the Parthenon"
The illusion of illusions

One of the oldest myths in human history is that the Parthenon was cleverly built with curves so that it looks straight, to correct some visual illusions

In this paper I demonstrate that there are NO optical corrections in the Parthenon

arxiv.org/abs/2510.16831. [1/n]
The illusion of illusions: There are no optical corrections in the Parthenon
One of the oldest and most enduring myths in human history is the belief that the Parthenon was cleverly designed with various curved structures and sizes in order to correct optical illusions, and th...
arxiv.org
October 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Visiting Ephesus at #embointegmod25 to look for the missing AlphaFold 3 code
October 2, 2025 at 2:32 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Would you like to come to my lab for a postdoctoral position? Apply for the EPFL AI Centre fellowship: epfl.ch/research/fun.... FYI, I have funding (ERC & Simon's collaboration) also for 1-2 top candidates who will not secure the fellowship. Same for
@krzakalaf.bsky.social lab.
EPFL AI Center and Swiss AI Initiative Postdoctoral Fellowships
The 2nd call is now open with a deadline for submissions of 3 November (17.00 CET)!Applications are encouraged from researchers at the postdoctoral level with a keen interest in collaborative, interdi...
epfl.ch
September 30, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
💥 We are *also* organizing Machine Learning for Structural Biology @ EurIPS, Copenhagen!!

Topics include anything in the ML+bio intersection.

Submit your ML+bio short papers! Authors can even present in both locations if they have people in both locations 🚀
You asked and we listened... @workshopmlsb.bsky.social is excited to be expanding to Copenhagen, DK at @euripsconf.bsky.social 🎉

Two workshops (San Diego & Copenhagen) will run concurrently to support broader attendance. You can indicate your location preference(s) in the submission portal💫
September 12, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Cool-looking work by @piompons.bsky.social @albecazzaniga.bsky.social @fra-cutu.bsky.social, going beyond existing works on sampling different conformational ensembles with AF2.
September 4, 2025 at 8:10 AM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Recently tested some de-novo minibinders against two targets (thanks Adaptyv!) designed using our open-source design library, `mosaic`; our best method got hit rates of 7/10 and 8/10 and affinities as low as single-digit nanomolar. Wrote up some thoughts here: blog.escalante.bio/minibinder-d...
September 2, 2025 at 2:39 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Posts about research on Bluesky receive substantially more attention than similar posts on X, formerly called Twitter

go.nature.com/45Ftiw4
Research posts on Bluesky are more original — and get better engagement
Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X.
go.nature.com
August 29, 2025 at 8:28 AM
Two exciting openings with us! 🤖🧬🆎🧫💉
- AI Scientist 👉 lnkd.in/eDXHH4E8
- AI Scientist, Drug Creation 👉 lnkd.in/eEvGyaTR

You'll work on antibody sequence/structure design, antibody-antigen co-folding, antibody-antigen binding prediction, physics-based methodologies, and more!

DMs welcome!
August 29, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
🎉 Excited to share that the last paper of my PhD is now published in PRX Life!

We introduce RAG-ESM, a retrieval-augmented framework that makes pretrained protein language models (like ESM2) homology-aware with minimal training cost.

📄 Paper: journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...
📢 Our new preprint is out on bioRxiv! We introduce RAG-ESM, a retrieval-augmented framework that improves pretrained protein language models like ESM2 by making them homology-aware with minimal additional training costs.
🔗 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
💻 github.com/Bitbol-Lab/r...

1/7
August 21, 2025 at 4:13 PM
@cyrilmalbranke.bsky.social is 🦋!

"ProteomeLM significantly outperforms DCA in recovering experimentally validated interactions. In H. sapiens, ProteomeLM achieves an AUC of 0.83, compared to 0.73 for DCA. Among the top 10 million scored pairs, it recovers 50% of known PPI, versus only 20% for DCA"
August 21, 2025 at 2:51 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
A no-miss opportunity to join EPFL. We are a vibrant (had to use it 😉) community working in all branches of basic sciences and engineering, and interdisciplinary studies are strongly encouraged.
If you want more information, contact the committee heads, or feel free to DM me.

tinyurl.com/bd27ky7p
Assistant/associate Professor of AI-assisted Biophysics at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Group Leader at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI)
The School of Basic Sciences (Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics) at EPFL and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) jointly seek to appoint a Tenure Track Assistant or tenured Associate Professor in AI-As...
tinyurl.com
August 21, 2025 at 6:35 AM
"When even the most benign activities are subject to capricious disruption and political interference, the luxury of disengagement is no longer a viable option."
I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...
I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
The “Mozart of Math” tried to stay out of politics. Then it came for his research.
newsletter.ofthebrave.org
August 19, 2025 at 1:02 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
AtomWorks is out! Building upon @biotite_python, we built a toolkit for all things biomolecules and trained RF3 with it. All open-source, test it via `pip install atomworks`!

AtomWorks: github.com/RosettaCommo...
RF3: github.com/RosettaCommo...
Paper: tinyurl.com/y2w4z65b

1/6
August 15, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
From social media apps to bank loans and hiring/firing decisions to search engines and shopping sites, are you tired of living a life ruled by opaque algorithms?

Pre-order now to Take Back Control on August 5.
bit.ly/4idpeGr
June 4, 2025 at 4:28 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Excited to share work with
Zhidian Zhang, @milot.bsky.social, @martinsteinegger.bsky.social, and @sokrypton.org
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
TLDR: We introduce MSA Pairformer, a 111M parameter protein language model that challenges the scaling paradigm in self-supervised protein language modeling🧵
Scaling down protein language modeling with MSA Pairformer
Recent efforts in protein language modeling have focused on scaling single-sequence models and their training data, requiring vast compute resources that limit accessibility. Although models that use ...
biorxiv.org
August 5, 2025 at 6:31 AM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Our development of machine-learned transferable coarse-grained models in now on Nat Chem! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
I am so proud of my group for this work! Particularly first authors Nick Charron, Klara Bonneau, Aldo Pasos-Trejo, Andrea Guljas.
Navigating protein landscapes with a machine-learned transferable coarse-grained model - Nature Chemistry
The development of a universal protein coarse-grained model has been a long-standing challenge. A coarse-grained model with chemical transferability has now been developed by combining deep-learning m...
doi.org
July 18, 2025 at 10:45 AM
Proved that the diabolical Einstein field equations can be formulated as a well-posed initial value problem, paving the way for huge progress in mathematical general relativity that continues to this date.

Goodbye, Madame Choquet-Bruhat
June 6, 2025 at 3:25 PM
#Postdoc opportunity in #protein #evolution at #EPFL

I can highly recommend working with Anne-Florence Bitbol! You'll bounce ideas off a world-class scientist with an awe-inspiring range of interests and a sharp mind—without sacrificing quality of life or a lake view.

tinyurl.com/ProteinPostdoc
June 4, 2025 at 11:03 AM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
French scientist denied US entry after officers find phone messages criticizing Trump
French scientist denied US entry after officers find phone messages criticizing Trump
France’s research minister said the scientist was traveling to Houston for a conference when his phone was searched France’s research minister said a French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched…
www.theguardian.com
March 19, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Bluesky is the place for science.
Mike spotted this before the rest of us. 🫡

Publications from 2025 are shared more on Bluesky than on X/Twitter.
About to talk to medical affairs colleagues, with the news that Bluesky is carrying more posts about new journal publications than X #bluesky #altmetrics #x #xparrot
March 13, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Go Sweden! 🇸🇪
March 11, 2025 at 8:13 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
🚨 Check out DrugFlow, our new generative model for structure-based drug design. DrugFlow provides an atom-level confidence score for each designed molecule, and can adjust molecular size on the fly!

Additional details in thread 🧵

#ICLR2025
The code & camera-ready version of our #ICLR2025 paper on "Multi-domain Distribution Learning for De Novo Drug Design" are now available

📚 Paper: openreview.net/forum?id=g3V...

💻 Code: github.com/LPDI-EPFL/Dr...

(1/4)
March 11, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Reposted by Umberto Lupo
Dear US colleagues,
In response to the Trump administration, my university @univ-amu.fr is setting up a new program dedicated to welcoming American scientists wishing to pursue their work in France.
There are several M$ in the budget.
www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/ac...
Safe Place For Science: Aix Marseille Université ready to welcome American scientists | Aix Marseille Université
In a context where some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research, our university is announcing the launch of the Safe Place For Science program, dedicated to w...
www.univ-amu.fr
March 7, 2025 at 1:32 PM
Hello American friends here. Please consider making gigantic protests great again. This platform is too small. A centralized app for coordination seems a good idea to me.
Our next date of mobilization - we are calling for Remove, Reverse, Reclaim.

This April 5th, we are calling for nation-wide protests and sit-ins to take place. 50 Protests. 50 States. 1 Movement.

#RemoveReverseReclaim #PeoplesMovement #WeAre50501 #50501movement @polrev.bsky.social
March 6, 2025 at 9:12 AM