Protein Design Competition Promises to Publish Failures
Adaptyv Bio and Anthropic will support testing of over 5,000 protein designs and promise to publish all results, including failures, with reuse permitted under the ODC-BY license.
Adaptyv Bio and Anthropic promise to publish even failed protein designs
Adaptyv Bio, which operates a laboratory for making and testing proteins, and Anthropic, the developer of the AI system Claude, will commit more than $1 million to synthesizing and testing over 5,000 protein designs in an open competition. Anthropic will separately provide over $1 million in Claude credits. The organizers promise to publish every result, including failures.
The first challenge makes the experimental requirements concrete. Participants must design a protein that binds to the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) in the acidic environment of a tumour at pH 6.5 and releases it at pH 7.4, characteristic of healthy tissue. In some cancer cells, this receptor stays active and drives their growth. The protein must also recognize the human and mouse versions of the receptor equally well, so it does not need redesigning when moving from mouse experiments to human trials. These are the competition's requirements; testing will establish which designs meet them.
The data will appear in ProteinBase, an open database of experimental data. The ODC-BY license will allow reuse with attribution. Participants will retain the rights to their designs. Publishing failed designs will tell other researchers which constructs have already been tested and what the experiments found.
The competition's scientific value will therefore depend on both successful proteins and published evidence about failures. Comparing this promise with Experiment's rules will require a separate check of the Experiment sharing guide.
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Sources
[1] proteinbase.com
[2] t.me
[3] x.com
[4] t.me
[5] proteinbase.com
[6] proteinbase.com
This item was selected because it gives readers a concrete standard for judging research funding: whether failed experiments become usable knowledge. The linked Eternal Search page covers Experiment, a crowdfunding platform whose publication rules provide a relevant comparison without implying that it participates in the competition.