OpenFold AI Research Consortium Welcomes Six New Members: Astex, Biogen, Congruence, Polaris Quantum, Psivant, and SandboxAQ
2024年8月13日 - 6:30PM
ビジネスワイヤ(英語)
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.
About OpenFold
OpenFold is a non-profit AI research consortium of academic and
industry partners whose goal is to develop free and open-source
software tools for biology and drug discovery, hosted as a project
of the Open Molecular Software Foundation. Membership is encouraged
among Biotech, Pharma, Synthetic Bio, Software/Tech, and non-profit
research organizations. For more information about OpenFold
Consortium and its initiatives, please visit: OpenFold
Consortium
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