Open Discovery Challenge: How to Build a Verifiable Judge for AI-Designed Malaria Drugs
Generative models can propose thousands of plausible molecules in a day. The harder question is no longer whether an AI can draw a molecule. It is whether anyone can tell if that molecule is potent, selective, safe enough to investigate, and possible to synthesize.
That is the premise of the Open Discovery Challenge, a public leaderboard opened by VIDRAFT and FINAL-Bench for AI-designed malaria drug candidates.
The target is PfDHODH, the malaria parasite's dihydroorotate dehydrogenase. A useful candidate must inhibit the parasite enzyme, avoid the homologous human enzyme, survive long enough to matter, and cross both the red-blood-cell membrane and the parasite membrane.
The original announcement and entrant guide are available on Hugging Face:
