OpenFold AI Research Consortium Welcomes 4 New Members: Bayer, Dassault, CHARM Therapeutics and BaseCamp Research

 The non-profit consortium is developing publicly accessible advanced drug discovery software tools

DAVIS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OpenFold, a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research consortium whose goal is to develop free and open source software tools for biology and drug discovery, today announced the addition of four new industry members: Bayer, Dassault Systèmes, CHARM Therapeutics, and BaseCamp Research Ltd.

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 four new members join OpenFold’s founders: Mohammed AlQuraishi’s Laboratory, Cyrus Biotechnology, Arzeda, Outpace Bio and Genentech’s Prescient Design.

Bayer of Leverkusen, Germany, is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. Dassault Systèmes SE, of Velizy-Villacoublay, France, develops software to create 3D virtual environments for product design, simulation, and manufacturing. CHARM Therapeutics of London is applying 3D deep-learning technology for drug discovery and development. BaseCamp Ltd of London has created Knowledge Graph, a database of proteins from previously undiscovered organisms found in diverse natural environments, for development of new drugs, diagnostics and agricultural products.

“This growth in membership continues the momentum generated after the formation of the consortium, as well as the introduction of the first Consortium-released protein structure prediction AI model developed in Dr. Mohammed AlQuraishi’s laboratory, both in June of this year,” said Brian Weitzner, Ph.D. Outpace Bio’s Associate Director of Computational and Structural Biology and a co-founder of OpenFold.

“At Bayer, we are driving innovation and transformation. We are excited to be partners with OpenFold, where we can work with leading experts across industries to develop the best methodologies for pharmaceutical and agricultural product design. By computationally simplifying our discovery process, we can increase the speed and quality of product design,” said Dr. Ruth Wagner, VP, Head of Plant Biotechnology Data Science & Analytics at Bayer’s Crop Science division.

“By joining the growing OpenFold community we are excited to strengthen the use of AI in our discovery solution experiences.” Reza Sadeghi, Chief Strategy Officer BIOVIA, Dassault Systemes.

OpenFold’s mission is to bring the most powerful software ever created — AI systems with the ability to engineer the molecules of life — to everyone. These tools can be used by academics, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, or students learning to create the medicines of tomorrow, to accelerate basic biological research, and bring new cures to market that would be impossible to discover without AI.

About OpenFold

OpenFold is a non-profit artificial intelligence (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 please visit: OpenFold Consortium.

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