LigandForge Just Wrote the Compiler for Biological Software

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In March 2026, Andre Watson at Ligandal dropped LigandForge on bioRxiv — a discrete diffusion model that designs high-affinity peptide binders directly from receptor pocket geometry in a single forward pass. No docking. No iterative refinement. No waiting weeks for physics simulations. Over 700 sequences per second on a single GPU, peaking above 1,000. That’s 10,000 to one million times faster than BindCraft or BoltzGen.

The old drug discovery pipeline just became obsolete overnight. This isn’t incremental. It’s the moment artificial intelligence learned to speak the native language of proteins — and write the code that controls them.

LigandForge on BIOCOMPUTER

LigandForge Just Wrote the Compiler for Biological Software