Into:NOVA
Mining for medicine.
As of · Jun 4, 10:37 UTC
NOVA turns drug discovery into a live, decentralized contest. Miners compete to surface viable drug candidates from a 65 billion compound chemical space, with weekly protein targets refreshed by the Metanova team. The repo updated two days ago, the most recent target is an IL-6 nanobody, and the alpha is up 55.76% over the past 30 days.
What is NOVA
NOVA is an AI-powered drug discovery network. Miners compete each week to find molecules that bind tightly to a protein target chosen by the team, and validators re-score every submission using independent structural and binding models before paying rewards.
The simple version: Imagine a global treasure hunt where the prize is a molecule that could become a medicine. Every week the team picks a new disease-related protein. Thousands of search strategies run in parallel, and the cleanest hits get paid.
Centralized equivalent: Think Schrödinger or Recursion Pharmaceuticals, but the search engine is distributed across independent miners running their own models, with the scoring rules and target list published openly.
How it works:
- Miners compete in two tracks. In NOVA Compound, they submit candidate molecules tuned for high affinity to the weekly target, low affinity to anti-targets, and chemical novelty. In NOVA Blueprint, they instead submit search code that runs inside a standardized sandbox on an RTX 4090 against randomized targets.
- Validators re-score Compound submissions with Boltz-2 for structural fit and affinity, apply entropy bonuses for diverse chemistry, and invalidate any molecule already found earlier in the same target-week. For Blueprint, validators run the miner code, then re-score its 100-molecule output with PSICHIC.
Other research from the same neighborhood of the network.
