Protein Design Competition
In this competition, you can continue testing your skills as a protein designer by leveraging data from Round 1 to design a binding protein to the extracellular domain of EGFR. The top 200 designs will be experimentally validated in Adaptyv Bio’s automated wet lab with all results being open-sourced.
Round 2
Dataset 
Benchmark Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) is a transmembrane protein that plays a critical role in cell growth, differentiation, and survival. It is frequently overexpressed or mutated in various cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and head and neck cancer. This makes EGFR a crucial target for cancer therapies such as Cetuximab, an antibody with more than 1B USD in annual revenue.
Competition structure
Submission process
Every protein designer can submit up to 10 designs.
Designs must adhere to the following criteria:
- Only natural amino acids
- Max 250 amino acids in length
- Single chain
- At least 10 amino acid edit distance from published sequences
Evaluation criteria
Help us choose the metric for evaluating designs! Designs will be ranked based on the metric chosen by the community.
The top 100 designs will be selected for experimental testing.
100 additional designs will be chosen for their novelty, creativity in the design process or other interesting factors.
Lab evaluation
Selected designs will be tested in our Affinity Characterization workflow which includes protein expression and a high-quality kinetics assay to determine the binding affinity of the protein to the target.
In this round we will also conduct a neutralization assay against EGF to assess whether your designed protein can block its interaction with the receptor. This assay will test how effectively a molecule inhibits ligand-receptor binding and ensure your binder targets the correct site on EGFR for optimal neutralization.
You can find more information in our RFdiffusion case study.
Timeline
Prizes
In partnership with the AIDrugX Workshop at NeurIPS 2024, the top 3 designers will be given a presentation slot to describe their design approach.
In addition, the top 5 designers with the best binding affinity (= lowest KD value) will receive 10 free assays each to run at Adaptyv Bio for their own protein design campaigns.
Top 10 designers will additionally receive an Adaptyv Bio & Polaris Merch Pack.