The Changjiang Cup 2026 Global AI Protein Design Challenge, which is aimed at gathering the global innovation power of AI for science through an open contest, announced its competition topics and complete rules on Sunday, with worldwide registration open until the end of this month.
Guided by the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization and the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission, the challenge is jointly initiated and hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the Beijing-based Changping Laboratory, and the Shanghai-based Lin Gang Laboratory.
Proteins play crucial roles in catalysis, recognition, and signal transmission, with their performance largely determined by amino acid sequences. A protein composed of just 100 amino acids can theoretically have 20 to the power of 100 possible sequence combinations.
AI can learn the rules of sequences, structures, and functions from vast amounts of data, identifying promising candidate designs more quickly. However, whether an AI-designed protein can be synthesized, stably expressed, and achieve its intended function requires laboratory testing.
Featuring seven protein design targets, the competition focuses on the de novo design of VHH (nanobodies) or minibinders. The former can be understood as the smallest operational unit of an antibody and has significant application value in the fields of medicine and diagnostics. The latter showcases AI's ability to generate entirely new proteins not found in nature.
The organizing committee will conduct wet lab validation on no fewer than 7,000 selected candidate proteins, exploring the research cycle from AI design to automated experimental validation.
The competition is open to universities, research institutions, companies, and interdisciplinary innovation teams worldwide, encouraging researchers from the fields of AI, computational biology, structural biology, and protein engineering to collaborate across disciplines.
Over 1,900 teams have already registered — including nearly all of the global top 50 universities and more than 50 global innovative pharmaceutical companies — setting a record in terms of scale and level for similar events.
