About OpenBioSim
Our vision
Our vision is that of a general predictive biomolecular simulator — turning biology into an engineering activity, made accessible to all via open-source software.
Today, designing a medicine, an enzyme, or a biomaterial is largely an exercise in trial and error. Experiments are slow and expensive, and the computational methods that could replace them are unreliable at the margins, difficult to reproduce between groups, or locked inside costly software that only specialists can drive.
We think this is a solvable engineering problem rather than a permanent state of affairs. If the behaviour of any biological molecule can be predicted reliably and reproducibly, by anyone, then molecular design becomes an engineering discipline: you specify what you want, simulate it, and build it. That is the destination we are working toward, and we intend the tools that get us there to be freely available rather than rented.
We also actively scope the long-horizon technologies that could step-change what is predictable — machine learning and AI methods alongside physics-based simulation, and emerging hardware such as quantum computing — so that the vision remains reachable as the underlying science evolves.
Why an organisation like ours is needed
Our vision is too engineering-heavy and multidisciplinary for academia, which rewards novel publications over hardened, maintained tools. It is ill-suited to venture capital, whose returns require a proprietary moat and a fund-lifetime exit rather than a public good realised over decades. So we built a different kind of organisation: one that pursues an ambitious technical vision while funding it by solving real, immediate problems for partners whose needs point in the same direction.
What makes us different
- Deep computational-chemistry expertise and professional software engineering in one team.
- A not-for-profit structure: surplus is reinvested into research and community.
- Flexible, virtual teams assembled in weeks — staff, consultants, secondees, and open-source collaborators.
How we choose projects
We take on work where it (a) sits in molecular or biomolecular simulation, and (b) yields a reusable open component that advances the predictive simulator.
Work outside that scope we decline or refer on — we would rather send you to the right team than take a project we are not the best in the world at.
How organisations work with us
There are three main ways to engage. Most partnerships begin with a conversation about a specific bottleneck and grow from there.
Commission a frontier research project
We pursue a single long-horizon objective: a general predictive biomolecular simulator. Every project we accept is a step toward it.
We take on bespoke research projects in computational biomolecular science for partners in therapeutics, biotechnologies, and biomaterials — including the ambitious, high-risk problems that others cannot or will not do because they are too engineering-heavy for a university, too speculative for a product roadmap, or too long-horizon for venture funding.
Typical shape: a defined technical goal, milestone-based delivery on quarterly cycles, a small senior team, and open outputs alongside any confidential integration work.
Integration & maintenance for industrial platforms
We integrate open-source components into proprietary platforms for industrial applications, then keep them working. This includes hardening academic code for production use, performance and parallel/GPU optimisation, packaging, testing, and long-term maintenance so the components stay compatible with your infrastructure as both evolve.
Typical shape: a renewable annual collaboration agreement, with your team retaining its proprietary stack and gaining a maintained open foundation beneath it.
Supporting scientific communities
We help communities actually use frontier methods, through training, upskilling, and dissemination — hands-on workshops, tutorials, documentation, and user support, delivered in person or online. This is how methods stop being papers and start being standard practice, and how we widen access for groups without the budget for commercial software.
Typical shape: funded training programmes, community workshops, or a dissemination workstream inside a larger research programme.
Start a conversation
Whether you have a well-defined technical problem or an ambition you are not sure how to fund, we are happy to talk it through and tell you honestly whether we are the right team.
Governance
OpenBioSim is a Community Interest Company — a not-for-profit structure that legally binds us to our community purpose. Our board ensures that operations remain aligned with the mission of the company.