LabDAO Core Team member Lily Hansen-Gillis
The Folding@home project made headlines throughout the COVID-19 pandemic for marshaling unused computing power to explore the protein folding search space to tackle the novel coronavirus. Empowering citizens to be scientists in their own right, the initiative ran large-scale simulations of different molecular configurations of proteins across a distributed network of “enrolled” computers across the world.
This decentralized paradigm was heralded for bringing people together around a common problem and crowd-sourcing computing power efficiently, but what if the computing power and problem-solving infrastructure were inversed? In other words, what if individuals could run their own projects by tapping into accumulated computing power and the tools for biological experimentation to boot?
LabDAO is making that dream a reality with its PLEX Platform. PLEX is an open-source command line tool designed to make not only computing resources but also a variety of biological-machine learning tools (coined the “BioML” suite within LabDAO) accessible across a variety of backgrounds. Whether experimenting with small-molecule docking or protein folding simulations of one’s own, PLEX allows users to tap into LabDAO’s library of tools, share results, and visualize them in less than five minutes.
This suite of tools and its use-enabling platform on top of it was put on display at Zuzalu’s Blockchain Meets Biology summit in early April, where LabDAO Core Team member Lily Hansen-Gillis demonstrated from start to finish a simulation of internal molecular dynamics of a protein to find its most stable configuration. Then, as a self-professed “non-coder,” she walked the audience through it from start to finish—all with a computer, WiFi, PLEX on the command line, and nothing more.
More broadly, LabDAO is a web3-enabled decentralized platform (part of the larger “DeSci” movement) committed to creating a more productive environment for open source-powered drug discovery. By making tools and resources at the cutting edge available to a broader ecosystem, LabDAO aims to create the right environment for transparent and accessible scientific advances. Whether by eliminating the need for researchers to have their own hardware or computing infrastructure or publishing results of experiments on a blockchain ledger such that they are tractable and reproducible, the organization is committed to making more innovation possible through collaboration — breaking down barriers caused by poor usability and siloed, niche expertise.
LabDAO’s efforts to build this DeSci world of the future for today recently received a boost in the form of a $3.6 million funding round from various other DAOs, Inflection.xyz, Balaji Srinivasan, and others. This influx of support will contribute to ongoing efforts to build out open-source software tools and reinforce LabDAO’s research ecosystem.
As for PLEX itself, the immediate next steps on the horizon include testing the platform in different scientific collaborations, containerizing various tools, and accumulating the necessary hardware to foster the BioML network.
As for the long-term, perhaps the next life-saving drug during the next major infectious disease outbreak will be designed with the power of PLEX, one decentralized step forward at a time. As the ecosystem continues to grow, only time will tell.
Thank you to Aishani Aatresh for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta, and some of the companies I write about are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference. For more content, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter.