UK to become world leader in drug discovery as Technology Secretary heads for London Tech Week

People around the world are set to benefit from new breakthroughs in AI-driven drug discovery to tackle previously untreatable diseases and transforming patient outcomes using British AI and research expertise.  

Announced today, the UK's ‘OpenBind' consortium will use breakthrough experimental technology to generate the world's largest collection of data on how drugs interact with proteins, the building blocks of the body. This will be twenty times greater than anything collected over the last fifty years – cementing the UK's position as a global hub for AI-driven drug discovery. 

This will support the training of new AI models that can identify promising new drugs, giving researchers an unparalleled ability to open up new fronts in the fight against disease- slashing development costs by up to £100 billion and sparking the innovation and economic growth which underpins the government's Plan for Change. 

Based at Diamond Light Source – the UK's national synchrotron facility at the Harwell Science Campus in Oxfordshire - the consortium will close critical data gaps, driving breakthroughs in healthcare which will unlock new avenues for drugs that can treat and beat diseases, as well as helping scientists harness the transformative potential of engineering biology to face down a range of other issues, such as designing new enzymes to tackle plastic waste. 

The consortium, backed with up to £8 million of investment from DSIT's newly established Sovereign AI Unit, will be led by some of the world's leading scientific minds including Professor Charlotte Deane at the University of Oxford, Professor Frank von Delft at Diamond Light Source and the University of Oxford, and David Baker, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner and head of the Institute for Protein Design at Washington University. 

The Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Peter Kyle said: 

London Tech Week is where we lay down a marker – not just as a government with technology at the heart of our agenda, but as a country that will harness its opportunities for the global good.

OpenBind is a prime example of how we're doing exactly that. Through home-grown AI expertise, we will be the driving force that doesn't just treat, but beats disease - benefitting every person in the world.

This week, we'll have plenty more to say on how we're using technology to drive growth, improve public services, and transform communities all over the country – delivering a Plan for Change grounded in action, not words.

This investment will also help to unlock unique strategic capabilities for UK AI and biosciences, securing the nation's critical influence over a sector fundamental to growth, health, and wellbeing. 

Investors from industry and philanthropy will be convened shortly to have the opportunity to co-invest and take the project to a point of maximum ambition. These discussion will include a roundtable at 10 Downing Street including Isomorphic Labs, Astex Pharmaceuticals, Apheris, Chai Discovery, Genentech, Genesis Therapeutics, Odyssey Therapeutix, Pfizer Inc, and Renaissance Philanthropy.

Professor Gianluigi Botton, CEO, Diamond Light Source, said:

At Diamond Light Source, a Joint Venture between the UK government through STFC and the Wellcome Trust, we are proud to be at the forefront of the UK's ambition to lead the world in AI-driven drug discovery.

OpenBind represents an exciting step forward in harnessing our unique capabilities to generate the high-quality data that AI needs to revolutionise healthcare, helping to cement the UK's position as a global hub for bioscience innovation.

Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO, Isomorphic Labs, said:

High-quality biochemical data supports superior AI models, which in turn helps us design new drug candidates faster.

We're delighted to partner with the OpenBind Consortium and the UK government to cultivate this vital resource. This is a brilliant initiative for UK science, and we're proud to support it from its inception.

Artificial Intelligence has become one of the key drivers of the government's Plan for Change, with its adoption across the economy sparking economic growth and creating jobs. Earlier this year the Prime Minister launched the AI Opportunities Action Plan - taking forward 50 recommendations which will mainline the technology into all sectors of the economy.   

To accelerate AI's rollout even further, Imperial College London has today announced it will partner with the World Economic Forum to deliver a Centre for AI Driven Innovation based in the UK. This dedicated centre will cement the UK's global position as a leader in the technology, driving innovation by unlocking AI's potential to transform economies across various sectors. The Centre will join the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) Network – a global network of 21 independent centres which bring together public and private sectors to maximise technological benefits while minimising risks. 

The UK government will work with both organisations to co-design the Centre's activities in alignment with the government's ambitions to harness AI to deliver a new era of growth and opportunity. 

Hugh Brady, President, Imperial College London said:  

This is a pivotal moment for UK innovation where the power and creativity of our science and technology can drive economic growth. This new Centre for AI Driven Innovation will unlock AI's potential to transform existing industries.

Anchored in the World Economic Forum global network of Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the new Centre hosted by Imperial creates a powerful multi-stakeholder platform from research through to scalable real-world innovation and adoption.

Børge Brende, President and CEO of World Economic Forum said: 

We are excited to collaborate with Imperial College London and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to launch the Centre for AI Driven Innovation, the first UK-based centre in the World Economic Forum's global Network of Centres for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

This milestone comes at a pivotal moment, as AI emerges as a powerful catalyst for prosperity and accelerated transformation across all sectors of the economy. The Centre will play a key role in helping the UK shape the global AI innovation agenda, providing a unique platform for collaboration with one of the world's largest multistakeholder communities of AI experts.

The announcements come as the Technology Secretary prepares to deliver his keynote address to London Tech Week later today, where his speech will set out the range of actions the government is taking to harness technology to boost growth, improve public services, and unlock new opportunities for communities across the UK.

Further commentary welcoming today's announcements:

Professor Charlotte Deane of the University of Oxford said:

OpenBind realises a major gear-shift for AI in drug discovery by investing in the data that powers it. 

This funding will mean we can begin generating a catalogue that not only dwarfs in quantity everything messily accumulated over half a century, but transcends it in quality and is geared towards powering the AI algorithms.

Professor Frank von Delft of Diamond Light Source and the University of Oxford said:

OpenBind is unique double opportunity:  whereas to date we experimental scientists have generated data as a byproduct of answering our scientific questions, now we combine forces with AI scientists and produce the data their AIs actually need.  And to do so, we will align several very different types of experiments, harnessing recent dramatic advances, including those we've achieved at Diamond. 

As this accelerates drug design, we will gain currently unthinkable ways to dissect how diseases work and what to do about them.

Robin Roehm, CEO and co-founder of Apheris said:

The utility of AI models in predicting protein-small molecule structure and affinity pairs hinges on the quality and scale of training data.

The life sciences sector urgently needs more comprehensive data, and collaborative networks like the AI Structural Biology Consortium where multiple Pharmas jointly collaborate are an example of this. OpenBind has the potential to transform small molecule drug discovery by developing datasets that are orders of magnitude larger than what is currently available.

Karmen Čondić-Jurkić, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Open Molecular Software Foundation (OMSF) said:

OMSF is excited to participate in OpenBind and contribute to building open datasets and infrastructure that will power the next generation of ML/AI models for drug discovery. Expanding high-quality public datasets is essential for advancing molecular science, both for training and validating new computational approaches.

We believe this collaboration is an opportunity to bring experimental and computational researchers closer together, accelerating innovation across the field.

Mohammed AlQuraishi, Founder, OpenFold; Professor, Departments of Systems Biology and Computer Science, Columbia University, said:

The task of predicting structures of molecules bound to proteins is challenged by a severe paucity of data, crucial for training data-hungry machine learning models such as OpenFold3.

The OpenBind project is poised to transform this dynamic, first by providing significant amounts of new and diverse structural data to fuel machine learning, and second by working synergistically with OpenFold to focus data acquisition on molecules and proteins with the greatest potential for improving the accuracy of predictive models.

David Rees PhD FMedSci, FRSC, Chief Scientific Officer, Astex Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, UK.

As a pioneer in fragment-based drug discovery, Astex is excited to be involved in this new initiative to build a unique database that will help the UK to remain at the forefront of developments in this field.

Training AI models with experimentally determined protein-ligand crystal structure data can significantly accelerate the drug discovery process and deliver new medicines more efficiently.

Dr Ed Griffen, Technical Director at MedChemica said:

At MedChemica we apply chemistry machine learning at scale and speed to design and analyse large data sets to give exploitable knowledge.  

One of the critical areas of weakness in drug discovery is relating how protein-drug structures are related to how strongly a possible drug binds to that protein structure. The goal of OpenBind is to gather and analyse enough of the right data so that machine learning can make useful predictions. With better predictions we can run drug hunting projects faster and cheaper, bringing new therapies to the clinic more quickly.

OpenBind is a keystone in the bridge from basic science to new ways of treating the diseases and conditions that afflict patients world wide. OpenBind's scale is globally strategic and leading beyond what is being done anywhere else. MedChemica is delighted and proud to be able to contribute to this endeavour.

Joshua Meier, Co-founder and CEO, Chai Discovery, said:

The UK's OpenBind initiative provides the rich, open data frontier our AI models need to design better medicines faster, and we're excited to contribute our open state-of-the-art structure prediction technology to this national effort.

Notes to editors

OpenBind will create the largest open dataset of experimentally validated drug–protein interactions in history. By addressing a long-standing gap in pharmaceutical R&D: the lack of high-quality, large-scale datasets linking small molecules to the proteins they bind. These datasets are essential for training high quality AI models for early-stage drug design.  

OpenBind will deploy automated chemistry and high-throughput X-ray crystallography to eventually generate more than 500,000 protein - ligand complex structures and affinity measurements over 5 years. This would represent a 20-fold increase over all public data produced in the last half-century - filling a critical gap in the data ecosystem that has slowed the development and evaluation of modern generative models.  

OpenBind provides a foundational dataset that will underpin progress across multiple areas of technology - including structure prediction, generative molecular design, docking, and active learning workflows. It is designed to work in synergy with other emerging approaches to help reduce trial-and-error experimentation, inform candidate selection, and support more systematic exploration of chemical space.  

OpenBind's senior consortium principal investigators are: 

• Professor Frank von Delft (Diamond Light Source and University of Oxford) 
• Professor Charlotte Deane (University of Oxford) 
• Dr John Chodera (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre) 
• Dr Mark Murcko (MIT and Disruptive Biomedical LLC)
• Professor Mohammed AlQuraishi (Columbia University)  
• Professor David Baker (University of Washington) 
• Dr Ed Griffen (MedChemica Limited) 
• Professor Paul Brennan (University of Oxford) 
• Professor Sir David Stuart (Diamond Light Source)
• Dr Martin Walsh (Diamond Light Source)

About Diamond Light Source

Diamond Light Source provides industrial and academic user communities with access to state-of-the-art analytical tools to enable world-changing science. Shaped like a huge ring, it accelerates electrons to near light speeds, producing a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, which is then directed off into 35 laboratories known as beamlines. In addition to these, Diamond offers access to several integrated laboratories including the world-class Electron Bio-imaging Centre (eBIC) and the Electron Physical Science Imaging Centre (ePSIC).     

Diamond serves as an agent of change, addressing 21st century challenges such as disease, clean energy, food security and more. Since operations started, more than 16,000 researchers from both academia and industry have used Diamond to conduct experiments, with the support of approximately 800 world-class staff. More than 14,000 scientific articles have been published by our users and scientists.     

Funded by the UK government through the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), and by the Wellcome Trust, Diamond is one of the most advanced scientific facilities in the world, and its pioneering capabilities are helping to keep the UK at the forefront of scientific research.     

Diamond was set-up as an independent not for profit company through a joint venture, between the UKRI's Science and Technology Facilities Council and one of the world's largest biomedical charities, the Wellcome Trust - each respectively owning 86% and 14% of the shareholding.