Minibinder design is just not that hard

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One computational project we've been working on at Escalante is designing minibinders: small (typically <100 amino acids) protein binders. Minibinders have a huge range of uses from therapeutics to in vitro assay development. There's been a lot of well-justified excitement in the area of computational de novo design of minibinders: it's (almost) fair to say that in the last 24 months de novo minibinder design went from exceedingly difficult and expensive to almost routine (see boolean biotech for a good overview). While many of these advances have taken the form of closed models trained by large computational teams at private companies, we think open-source models will ultimately win out: there is no real data moat for binder design today [2], and, unlike the early days of LLMs, there is little computational moat [3]. In fact, the partially open-source package, BindCraft, is one of the top binder design methods. Incidentally, this is pretty clearly a good thing: where would biotech be

Minibinder design is just not that hard [[1]] Nick Boyd , Sam Guns - 29 Aug, 2025 0:00 / 0:10 1× Minibinders to PDL1 One computational project we've been working on at Escalante is designing minibinders: small (typically <100 amino acids) protein binders. Minibinders have a huge range of uses from therapeutics to in vitro assay development. There's been a lot of well-justified excitement in the area of computational de novo design of minibinders: it's (almost) fair to say that in the last 24 months de novo minibinder design went from exceedingly difficult and expensive to almost routine (see b

Minibinder design is just not that hard

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