SandboxAQ Launches AQAffinity to Accelerate Structure-Free Drug Discovery on OpenFold3

New updates have been reported about SandboxAQ.

SandboxAQ has introduced AQAffinity, an AI model designed to predict drug–target binding affinity without requiring experimentally determined protein structures, directly addressing a critical bottleneck in early-stage drug discovery. Built on the OpenFold Consortium’s OpenFold3 biomolecular co-folding platform, AQAffinity enables rapid, structure-free affinity prediction, allowing biopharma teams to quickly rule out weak candidates, prioritize promising compounds earlier, and de-risk less-characterized protein targets before committing to costly wet-lab experiments. Executives evaluating AI drug discovery stacks should note that this positions SandboxAQ as a key technology provider within an open-source ecosystem that competes with more closed, proprietary co-folding and affinity platforms.

For SandboxAQ, AQAffinity expands its commercial relevance in life sciences by pairing its AI and quantum-inspired Large Quantitative Models with an open, transparent framework that is available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, lowering adoption friction for pharma and biotech users. The company is emphasizing trust and evaluability: researchers receive full visibility into training data, methods, and performance, simplifying internal benchmarking, fine-tuning on proprietary datasets, and integration into virtual screening and hit-to-lead workflows. Early beta access for OpenFold Consortium members in December 2025, alongside endorsements from consortium leadership and industry users, signals growing ecosystem traction and potential pipeline impact for drug developers that adopt OpenFold3 plus AQAffinity. Strategically, this move reinforces SandboxAQ’s positioning as a B2B infrastructure provider at the intersection of AI and quantum techniques, strengthening its role in AI-driven drug discovery while leveraging the consortium’s plan to continuously enhance OpenFold3 and surrounding tools to accelerate the development of novel therapies.