OpenFold Consortium’s new members will bring privacy-preserving, AI infrastructure and collaboration on proprietary data to the Consortium

OpenFold Consortium, an open science initiative advancing foundational AI tools for biological applications, announced today that Apheris and Johnson & Johnson have joined the consortium as new members. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in the effort to build and share high-performing, open-source models that accelerate drug discovery across the biomedical ecosystem.

Since its founding, OpenFold has released AI models for structural biology, including OpenFold, OpenFold-SoloSeq, and OpenFold-Multimer, with recent work focused on a new platform that can predict detailed structures of proteins, DNA, and small drug-like molecules. OpenFold Consortium’s models and datasets are freely available under permissive licenses.

Apheris, a company pioneering secure collaborative AI training on proprietary and IP-sensitive data, brings added insurance that sensitive data will be secured to the OpenFold mission. While OpenFold provides open models and training code, Apheris enables model customization and improvement on distributed data without compromising privacy. By joining the Consortium, Apheris contributes expertise in privacy-preserving infrastructure, allowing OpenFold’s foundation models to be benchmarked using proprietary datasets from Consortium members while maintaining strict data protection.

Apheris’s distinct and complementary consortium, the AI Structural Biology Consortium (AISB), will focus on enabling confidential collaboration across proprietary datasets while OpenFold will continue building open-source foundation models. Together, the distinct consortiums represent complementary pieces of a larger ecosystem. OpenFold supplies the public model infrastructure, and initiatives like AISB extend its utility across private, high-value data settings.

“Progress in life sciences AI depends on combining open models with proprietary data,” said Robin Röhm, CEO and Co-Founder of Apheris, “That’s why we’re proud to support the OpenFold mission and help make collaborative training a reality.”

“The alignment of these two new OpenFold members strengthens the Consortium’s broader goal of transforming drug discovery through collaborative AI initiatives. With support from these two new members, OpenFold is poised to accelerate the development of generalizable, secure, and clinically relevant AI tools,” said Lucas Nivon, CEO, Cyrus Biotechnology.

About OpenFold

OpenFold is a non-profit AI research consortium of academic and industry partners focused on developing 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.

OpenFold membership and media inquiries

Press and membership inquiries should be directed to Mallory Tollefson, Ph. D. at mallory.tollefson@omsf.io.

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