The PETase Tournament and Targeting Aging to Treat Disease

This video recording from Digital World Biology features two speakers who presented at the 2025 Antibody Engineering Hackathon. The hackathon provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to create research projects related to antibody engineering. The first presentation is from Bijoy Desai, PhD, technical project manager at the Align Foundation. Desai presents on the PETase Tournament, a protein engineering competition. The second presentation is from Ben Blue, PhD, chief technical officer and co-founder of Ora Biomedical. Blue presents on longevity intervention research performed at Ora Biomedical.

In the first presentation, Desai introduces the PETase Tournament as a "community benchmark for predictive and generative models in protein engineering." Desai discusses the 2025 tournament goal of benchmarking PETase design models for properties that have applications for plastic recycling. Topics covered include the tournament's structure, data acquisition, timeline, schedule, and evaluation methods.

During the second presentation, Blue outlined longevity medication research being performed at Ora Biomedical. The presenter went into detail on the longevity drug Rapamycin, interventions for Alzheimer's disease, and therapies for space travel stress. The presenter also shared online tools to support science education, highlighting the Million Molecule Challenge, an open access database of longevity interventions.

This video runs 01:05:39 minutes in length. Other videos in this series are available to view separately.