The nonprofit consortium is advancing open-source foundation models and software infrastructure for biology and drug discovery.
OpenFold Consortium, an open science initiative advancing open-source AI tools for biology and drug discovery, announced today that eleven new members have joined the consortium including Absci, Adaptive Biotechnologies, Benchling, Chemical Computing Group, Daiichi Sankyo, Flagship Pioneering, Kiin Bio, Nanome, Nxera, Pledge Tx, and Superluminal.
These additions further expand OpenFold’s growing network of academic and industry collaborators working to build and share high-performing, openly available AI models for biological research and drug discovery. Since its founding, OpenFold has released widely used open-source models for structural biology, with recent work focused on next-generation systems for proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules.
“OpenFold is becoming shared infrastructure for the next generation of AI-enabled drug discovery,” said Woody Sherman, Chair of the OpenFold Consortium Executive Committee. “This new group of members reflects the breadth of the ecosystem now building on open biomolecular AI: therapeutic discovery, antibody design, GPCR structure-based design, scientific software, data infrastructure, and immersive molecular visualization. Their participation strengthens our ability to build open, auditable, and extensible models that the entire field can use, test, and improve.”
AI-based structure prediction is becoming an increasingly important tool for biology and drug discovery, but many of the hardest problems remain unsolved. The next challenge is to build open, extensible models that go beyond static structure prediction and support molecular recognition, protein design, antibody-antigen modeling, small-molecule interactions, and practical drug discovery workflows. OpenFold’s mission is to help ensure that these capabilities are developed transparently, rigorously benchmarked, and made broadly accessible to the scientific community.
The addition of these organizations expands OpenFold’s community across multiple areas of the life sciences ecosystem, including therapeutic discovery, antibody design, GPCR biology, scientific software, molecular visualization, and AI-enabled R&D infrastructure.
Absci, based in Vancouver, WA, is a clinical-stage biotech company developing a generative AI platform for therapeutic antibody design. Absci is partnering with OpenFold to advance open methods for drug design, particularly for antibodies, which remain a challenging frontier for AI-based methods. "We've been delighted to work with the OpenFold team and support their efforts to achieve state-of-the-art performance on antibody-antigen folding," said Amir Shanehsazzadeh, Chief AI Officer of Absci.
Adaptive Biotechnologies, based in Seattle, WA, is a commercial-stage biotechnology company focused on translating the genetic language of the adaptive immune system into clinical products to diagnose and treat disease. "Adaptive Biotechnologies is excited to be joining the OpenFold Consortium and to support the development of open-source models of biomolecular structure and interaction. These models will lay the foundation for further breakthroughs in understanding the adaptive immune system and harnessing its power in both diagnostics and therapeutics," said Harlan Robins, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder.
Benchling, based in San Francisco, CA, is the AI platform for biotech R&D, used by 1,300+ biotech companies including more than half of the world’s top 50 biopharma. With Benchling’s new Model Hub, scientists can discover, run, and track leading predictive models — including OpenFold2 and OpenFold3-preview — directly inside their research workflows, without standing up separate infrastructure. Predictions run at scale across large batches of sequences and feed automatically back into the experimental record, connecting in silico work to what happens next in the lab. Joining the OpenFold Consortium reflects Benchling’s commitment to making AI accessible to all scientists.
Chemical Computing Group, based in Montreal, Canada, provides a leading drug discovery software platform (MOE) that integrates visualization, modeling and simulations, and methodology development in a single package.
Daiichi Sankyo, headquartered in Tokyo, is a global healthcare company committed to becoming a trusted healthcare innovator, transforming the lives of people through its strength in science and technology. The company discovers and develops new standards of care to address diverse medical needs to fulfill its purpose of contributing to the enrichment of quality of life around the world. With a strategic focus on oncology, Daiichi Sankyo is advancing an industry-leading antibody drug conjugate portfolio along with identifying new breakthrough generating technologies to deliver practice-changing medicines to patients, healthcare professionals and society.
Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge, Mass.-based scientific innovation engine for transformative platforms and products, invents and builds companies with the potential to deliver multiple breakthroughs across human health, sustainability, and beyond. Flagship has a long track record of founding and scaling transformational, AI-native companies, applying advanced computational approaches to drive innovation. Central to this leadership is Pioneering Intelligence (PI), Flagship’s AI platform, which integrates data, models, and agentic systems across its ecosystem to compound scientific breakthroughs and accelerate the path from discovery to real-world impact.
Kiin Bio, based in London, UK, builds the collaborative platform where scientists and team can execute experiments, connect insights and accelerate decisions, from target to clinic. Kiin joined the OpenFold Consortium to support open, community-driven development of the models the field relies on. "Drug discovery slows down when insight gets stuck between teams and tools," said Filippo Abbondanza, CEO of Kiin Bio. "The models everyone builds on should be open, benchmarked and interconnected."
Nanome, based in San Diego, California, is the ultimate interface for scientific discovery, starting with molecular data. Whether through the web, AR/VR devices, or traditional displays, scientists visualize, analyze, and collaborate around molecular structures in immersive 3D environments, enabling breakthroughs they otherwise miss. Nanome is partnering with OpenFold to advance AI-driven structural biology. "We're excited to bring more structures to people through our partnership with OpenFold," said Steve McCloskey, CEO of Nanome. "Researchers around the world can now rapidly work together with predictive protein structures in greater detail than ever before. Advances in structure prediction, simulation, and immersive interfaces are fundamentally changing how research is done, making complex molecular insight more accessible, collaborative, and actionable."
Nxera Pharma, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a technology-powered biopharma focused on discovering and developing new specialty medicines, focused on GPCR structure-based drug design. The company’s proprietary NxWave™ platform combines high-resolution structural biology with AI-driven computational chemistry, and quantum-inspired physics approaches to enable rational drug discovery.
Pledge Therapeutics, based in Canton, Massachusetts, is a preclinical drug discovery company advancing models that move beyond pattern recognition to learn the underlying physics and energetics of molecular interactions. By anchoring generative AI in experimentally determined structural and biophysical data, Pledge is designing next-generation therapeutics once considered out of reach. OpenFold’s ethos reflects Pledge Therapeutics belief that accuracy, interpretability, and transparency, not scale alone, will drive the next leaps in AI-driven drug discovery. This represents a rare alignment between open science and industry, and Pledge Therapeutics remains committed to expanding this frontier through shared innovation.
Superluminal Medicines is a cutting-edge drug discovery company focused on creating small-molecule oral therapies targeting GPCRs to address significant unmet medical needs. Through its proprietary Hyperloop Platform, the company integrates generative AI, machine learning, and advanced structural biology to rapidly predict dynamic protein conformations. Rather than relying on static images, Superluminal models "movies" of protein movement to precisely capture how biological targets interact. By bridging this advanced computation with rigorous experimental validation, Superluminal is able to accelerate the discovery of highly precise, best-in-class medicines with unprecedented speed.
About OpenFold
OpenFold is a nonprofit 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 (OMSF). Membership is encouraged in organizations across biotech, pharma, synthetic biology, software/technology, academia, and nonprofit research.
For more information, please visit OpenFold’s website.
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Contacts
Media Contact: Mallory R. Tollefson, Ph. D.
mallory.tollefson@omsf.io
