Bio Protocol

September in the Biosphere 🌐

- Open Science Index: We launched a searchable directory with 6,720 scientific resources.

- Launchpad: We added credit-card wallet funding through Privy.

- New Bio website: We revamped our website, bringing BIOS, OpenLabs, Buildspace, Launchpad and Biofy together in one place.

- PeptAI: Selected for Track 2 of the Adaptyv Bio × Anthropic Protein Design Competition.

- NeuroLab Ignition Sale: The sale closed 2.2× oversubscribed, with more than 442K USDC committed by over 650 participants. NDT reward claims for veBIO stakers are now live on app.bio.xyz. We also refunded all BioXP spent on the Ignition Sale.

Read the full monthly report ↓

Highlights and key takeaways from DeSci Summit Mumbai this week 👇

→ The IP question decides whether a biologist can use frontier models at all. Several PhD labs bar ChatGPT and Claude outright, since prompting them leaks unpublished research.

→ Ask a frontier model to design a 10 amino acid peptide that binds and inhibits the SARS-CoV main protease and the request gets flagged. Both refusals ran live on stage, and the same prompt at @biosdiscovery returned an answer plus a route into a binder generation pipeline.

→ Finding a binder is finding a needle in a haystack. Doing it in silico only became possible after @GoogleDeepMind in 2020 and RFdiffusion from the Baker Lab.

→ Ten scored binders come back within ten minutes. The models sit on 200 GPUs, which opens the platform to anyone who shows up today.

→ RFdiffusion 4 runs on Mac, ported by @GeeveGeorge and currently the fastest RFdiffusion MLX model. A scientist designing a drug keeps every piece of data on their own machine.

→ A Qwen 8B model runs at 100 tokens/sec on M1 through M5 using custom kernels, ahead of ZSpec and Splash. The team calls it spec metal.

→ Qwen orchestrates and RFdiffusion designs, so drug discovery runs fully locally. The @biosdiscovery CLI is agent-native, built on the view that agents will be the ones using this software.

→ In coding and math the verifier is fast. In biology the verifier is the world, which is why wet lab demand rises as more people design medicines with AI.

→ Robios ran its first live demonstration. It loads and unloads the machine and records conditions like temperature, so two runs can be compared.

→ Human in the loop throughout. A senior scientist watches from home, gives feedback at any time, and steers it mid-run.

→ Competitors buy their robots from OEMs at prices most labs are unable to afford. Robios is built on open source and aimed at NCBS Bangalore and a wet lab in Mumbai.

→ Local agentic swarms are next, 10 to 20 agents on a MacBook reading real research papers and citing them. Citation is how hallucination gets reduced.

→ A research proposal takes around 116 hours to write. Grant acceptance has declined to 19% in the UK, 13% for US health research, and 8% for EU early career awards.

→ Publication costs roughly $12,000 at Nature and 17 months. @openlabsbio puts those first steps in one place, with an index covering failed and ongoing work, challenges for calling in skills, vaults funding first studies, and a launchpad for pre-company raises.

Idea, lab, funded IP, product.

Every layer we build shortens one of those and opens the next.

Full talks ↓

Robios in action at DeSci Mumbai!

AI-designed molecules still need to be tested in the lab. With Robios, we’re exploring how robotics could help researchers turn those designs into experiments and use the results to guide what comes next.

From an initial question to a project developed in public, Ryan is showing how researchers can use @openlabsbio to find tools and work alongside AI agents and other contributors to move their ideas forward.

DeSci Mumbai is LIVE! 🇮🇳

The BIOS team kick things off with the first live demo of Robios, the lab robot Bio Protocol has been building.

Tune in live ↓ x.com/i/broadcasts/2…