The non-profit consortium is developing publicly accessible advanced AI-based drug discovery software tools
OpenFold, a leading non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research consortium focused on developing free and open source software tools for biology and drug discovery, today announced the addition of six new industry members. Joining the consortium are Astex Pharmaceuticals, Biogen, Congruence Therapeutics, Polaris Quantum Biotech, Psivant Therapeutics, and SandboxAQ, bringing unique expertise and a commitment to leveraging AI technologies to accelerate drug discovery and improve patient outcomes.
“This expansion marks a significant stride forward in advancing AI-driven solutions for healthcare and life sciences,” said Christina Taylor, Senior Science Fellow at Bayer Crop Science and executive member of OpenFold. “Our new members bring considerable expertise to our AI platform development programs.”
OpenFold, a consortium of academic and industry partners founded in February 2022, is a project of the Open Molecular Software Foundation, a non-profit organization advancing molecular sciences by building communities for open source research software development. The new members join OpenFold’s founders and existing members: Mohammed AlQuraishi’s Laboratory, Arzeda, Basecamp Research, Bayer, CHARMM Therapeutics, Cyrus Biotechnology, Dassault Systemes, Gabriel Rocklin’s Laboratory, NVIDIA, Outpace, Puxano, UCB, and Valence Labs.
Astex Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, UK, a company with expertise in small molecule therapeutics, joins the consortium with a focus on structure-based drug design. They underscore the importance of OpenFold’s collaborative approach saying, “Astex is delighted to join the OpenFold Research Consortium. Structure-based drug design is fundamental to our drug discovery strategy, and we are excited by the new generation of structure prediction tools. OpenFold’s work is crucial in bringing academia and industry together to push the performance and accuracy of these tools which aim to enable discovery and development of better medicines for patients.”
Congruence Therapeutics, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, advances treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. This biopharmaceutical company emphasizes the collaborative spirit of OpenFold stating, “Congruence is pleased to announce that we’ve joined forces with OpenFold and other leading companies in the AI/ML field to benefit from early access to data sets and help drive the direction of new research in AI-driven drug discovery. OpenFold is the gold standard of AI research consortiums, and we share their passion for engineering the medicines of the future.”
SandboxAQ, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and renowned for its expertise in integrating AI and quantum simulations, is keen to share expertise to advance healthcare outcomes. “SandboxAQ is proud to contribute its biopharma knowledge and Quantitative AI simulation expertise to support the OpenFold Consortium and advance software solutions that have real-world impact in healthcare and life sciences,” said Andrea Bortolato, Director of Drug Discovery at SandboxAQ. “We’re eager to share the learnings from our recent breakthroughs in Large Quantitative Models for drug design so they can be applied to a greater number of challenging medical conditions.”
Polaris Quantum Biotech (PolarisQB), headquartered in Durham, NC, is a leader in Quantum Computing for drug discovery, and the builder of the Quantum-Aided Drug Design (QuADD) platform. QuADD identifies drug lead molecules from a chemical space of 10^30 molecular options, utilizing the increased optimization power of today’s quantum computing. “Polaris Quantum Biotech is thrilled to join OpenFold and its community of like-minded companies. We are especially excited to contribute to the development of open-source tools to expedite drug discovery,” said Dr. Shahar Keinan, CEO of PolarisQB.
Psivant Therapeutics of Boston, Massachusetts, looks forward to utilizing OpenFold AI algorithms to fast-track therapeutic development.Psivant founder, Dr. Woody Sherman, said, “Psivant Therapeutics is excited to join the OpenFold consortium. This collaboration enhances our ability to design better drugs using advanced computational tools. By integrating OpenFold’s protein folding and ligand co-folding platform, we can leverage the physics-based simulation tools in our QUAISAR platform earlier in projects to accelerate the development of therapeutics for patients. We believe a vibrant open science community is vital to the future of drug discovery.”
The addition of each new member strengthens OpenFold’s mission to foster innovation and collaboration in AI-driven drug discovery by developing tools that can be used by everyone—from budding students to the leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Together, the OpenFold Consortium aims to accelerate the development of transformative medicines through cutting-edge technologies and collaborative research efforts.
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