Speakers

Aleix Lafita is an Associate Director at GSK with over a decade of experience in protein bioinformatics and structural modelling. He develops and applies state-of-the-art protein modelling techniques at the human proteome scale to understand disease mechanisms and support drug discovery programs across therapeutic areas and modalities. He holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Cambridge and EMBL-EBI, and a Masters in Computational Biology from ETH Zurich. 

His research focuses on foundational AI models for protein sequence and structure prediction. He has authored 18 scientific publications and developed six open-source bioinformatics tools. He has served on two consecutive assessment teams for protein interaction prediction at CASP, the international double-blind protein structure prediction challenge; and worked closely with the RCSB PDB and Pfam teams. He has also been an active contributor to the open-source bioinformatics community, as a member of the BioJava core developer team, and continues to be an active collaborator with academia through industry partnerships such as Open Targets. 

At GSK, Aleix leads projects integrating experimental data with protein foundational models to tackle drug discovery challenges. Recent examples include fine-tuning protein language models with deep mutational scanning (DMS) data to improve clinical variant effect prediction, work presented at ICLR in 2024; and deploying structure prediction models such as AlphaFold and Boltz alongside cross-linking mass spectrometry (XLMS) data to map physical interactions across the human proteome.