The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $20 million over four years to Northwestern University to establish the nation’s first publicly accessible, AI-powered cloud laboratory for protein engineering.
The facility, called the AI-driven Rapid Experimental Automation Machine (DREAM) Cloud Lab, aims to become a national resource that will dramatically accelerate the development of new drugs, sustainable materials, agricultural technologies, and other biotech innovations.
The facility is one of the first 20 NSF-funded Programmable Cloud Laboratories (PCL) testbeds established to create a national network of AI-enabled and remotely accessible laboratories. Rather than requiring researchers to purchase and maintain expensive and sophisticated scientific equipment for their labs, this network enables scientists to remotely program experiments, access state-of-the-art equipment, and accelerate discoveries through shared data and AI tools.
Located within Northwestern’s Center for Synthetic Biology (CSB), DREAM serves as a protein engineering hub within the broader PCL network, enabling collaboration across scientific disciplines while sharing data, AI models, and best practices with other cloud laboratory nodes.
“Northwestern University is honored to be selected by NSF to host one of the nation’s first programmable cloud laboratory testbeds,” said President Moon Chan. “DREAM is an important initiative in which the Center for Synthetic Biology collaborates with researchers across the country to build a platform to advance important breakthroughs in protein engineering and broader biotechnology. This award is not only financial, but also strategic, and once again reflects the quality and ambition of Northwestern’s research leaders.”
“This funding recognizes Northwestern University’s long-standing leadership at the intersection of engineering, AI, and biology,” said Chris Schuh, dean of the McCormick School of Engineering. “This investment is a milestone not only for the university, but also for the rapidly growing biotech ecosystem in Chicago and across the state of Illinois.”
DREAM will be physically housed within CSB’s Synthetic Biology Foundry, a shared research facility equipped with advanced robotics and protein engineering tools. The Synthetic Biology Foundry is co-located with the Query InQbation Lab, Northwestern’s startup incubator hub, allowing research breakthroughs to move quickly from the lab to new companies and products.
“DREAM will build new companies, create new jobs, and positively transform our society by accelerating new technologies in manufacturing, critical mineral extraction, healthy aging, agriculture, and advanced materials,” said Julius B. Lux, DREAM Principal Investigator (PI) at Northwestern University. “Building DREAM within the Northwestern Center for Synthetic Biology will allow us to integrate our approaches to responsible innovation, strengthen the region’s biotechnology ecosystem, and serve the entire nation as a hub for innovative science and engineering that benefits everyone.”
Lux is the Margery Clare Carlson Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and co-director of the Center for Synthetic Biology at McCormick College. DREAM’s co-principal investigators are James N. Farley, Professor of Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship, Daniel Talman-Arcek, Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at McCormick College, and Co-Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology, and Nancy J. Farley. Han Liu, Orrington Lunt Professor of Computer Science at McCormick College and professor of statistics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences; Michael Jewett, professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering at Stanford University; Key players include Joshua Leonard, professor of chemical and biological engineering at McCormick College, and Michelle Hoffman, executive director of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium.
The power of protein engineering
Proteins perform almost all essential functions of life. Scientists are increasingly seeking to engineer proteins for a wide range of applications, including developing new therapeutics, recycling plastics, detecting environmental pollutants, and recovering important minerals. However, engineering proteins that can perform precisely the desired function remains time-consuming, expensive, and accessible to relatively few laboratories.
Recent advances in AI have enabled scientists to use computers to design promising proteins, but they still face significant bottlenecks. Scientists need to build and test proteins to generate the data needed to improve AI models. DREAM is designed to remove that bottleneck.
Through a cloud-based interface, users specify the functions they want the proteins to perform. The AI model then suggests promising designs, which are evaluated and cleared through a rigorous biosafety and biosecurity review process, before the robotic system automatically builds and tests those proteins. The resulting experimental data continuously improves the AI model. This testbed integrates the perspectives of the Ethics and Responsible Innovation Board to ensure that the entire system creates a design-build-test-learn cycle that quickly purifies proteins to safely and reliably meet users’ objectives.
“Constructing and testing proteins has historically been a tedious, time-consuming and expensive procedure,” Talman-Elcek said. “To overcome this problem, the DREAM facility leverages cutting-edge developments in protein synthesis using cell-free technology pioneered at Northwestern University. We are excited to see how our past successes pave the way for new developments that solve important global challenges.”
Over 300,000 proteins, 30 million data points
During the four-year award period, DREAM researchers expect to synthesize and characterize more than 300,000 proteins and generate up to 30 million data points. This creates one of the largest publicly available datasets for AI-guided protein engineering. The team plans to publish the data and AI model through an open access framework, establishing a national knowledge base on which scientists can build for years to come.
By providing researchers, startups, and industry partners with world-class AI-driven protein engineering capabilities and open-source models, DREAM will be a resource not only for academic researchers but also for startups and industry pioneering the frontiers of AI for biotechnology.
The DREAM node will be a foundational resource for Chicago and Illinois’ growing biotech sector, given its location in the heart of the Midwest bioeconomy and its national connections to national testbeds of other AI “self-driving” labs. The Chicago Biomedical Consortium, in collaboration with Northwestern University’s Office of Innovation and New Ventures, will provide expertise to DREAM’s translational process to ensure research is translated into applications and products that benefit the American people. As part of this goal, DREAM will also serve as a training ground for students and researchers in AI, lab automation, and synthetic biology, helping to prepare the future workforce in one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy.
“The Northwestern DREAM Cloud Lab will be a game-changer for Illinois,” said Kristy George, President and CEO of the Illinois Economic Development Corporation. “As the nation’s only AI protein engineering hub, we will add an important core facility to our strong life sciences ecosystem and provide new opportunities for companies looking to partner and grow in Illinois.”
Further connections to the northwest
NSF’s new PCL testbed program is aligned with the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission, a national initiative aimed at leveraging AI for scientific discovery. NSF will invest $380 million in all 20 selected teams.
Northwestern engineers will also contribute to two other PCL testbeds. Wei Chen, chair and professor of mechanical engineering, Wilson Cook, professor of engineering design, and professor of industrial engineering and management sciences, will serve as co-PIs for the Artificial Intelligence Network for Materials Design, led by Johns Hopkins University. Chris Wolverton, the Frank C. Engelhardt Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, will serve as co-PI of ATHENA: Advanced Testbed for high-throughput Experimentation in Nano- and Atomic Science, led by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
“The NSF Programmable Cloud Laboratories Initiative will unlock new discoveries in a wide range of fields while advancing AI-enabled technologies that will form the backbone of the automated scientific revolution,” said Irwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “These awards represent an important step toward achieving a virtuous cycle of automated hypothesis generation, autonomous experimentation, and the generation and interpretation of large amounts of high-quality experimental data to drive the next set of hypotheses, with researchers and students working together with automated systems at every step.”
