Gratitude for Our Trajectory to Date

Earlier this week, we announced the launch of Bind Research, a new not-for-profit organisation dedicated to delivering tools and datasets to make disordered proteins druggable.

We are extremely grateful for the financial backing from the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology, Eric Schmidt, and other partners. You can read more about them here.

Although our public launch is new, Bind has been in the making for well over 2 years. During that time, we have been fortunate to have an incredibly strong foundation of supporters and scientific collaborators and have spoken with hundreds of people. While future posts will spotlight our scientific partners and collaborations in greater detail, today we want to recognise some key players who helped us behind the scenes build our organisation from the very beginning.

Bind Research began as a bold idea. Early conversations—especially with Sam Rodriques and Erika Alden DeBenedictis—made it clear that if we wanted to place tools and datasets in the public domain and collaborate effectively with both academic disordered protein researchers and the biotech/drug discovery communities, the Focused Research Organisation (FRO) model was a perfect fit.¹

We are also thankful for the valuable feedback from Convergent Research—particularly Adam Marblestone—who has pioneered and championed the FRO model in the United States. Additionally, our huge thanks go to the team at Renaissance Philanthropy—especially Tom Kalil, Ronit Kanwar, and Jasnam Sidhu—for helping us reach potential funders and adapt the FRO model to the UK for the first time.

Bind would also not have been possible without the dynamic and well-connected team at Deep Science Ventures—especially Laura Fletcher, Dominic Falcao, and Mark Hammond—who helped incubate Bind Research for over a year before our formal incorporation. This support was essential to help us find our footing.

In the coming months, we plan to share details about Bind’s organisational structure in case others find it useful. If you are interested in starting an FRO in the UK, be sure to check out the new partnership between Convergent Research and the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).

---