Did Anyone Beat Chance on the Hardest Leash Bio Binding Test?

Ian Quigley says that on the hardest split of Leash Bio's public binding contest, nobody did better than chance, and three of the top five entries were a noisy tutorial notebook.

Leash Bio generated the set and released it. BindingDB, then the biggest public collection of small molecules binding protein targets rather than cells, held a little under 3 million physical interactions. The release was about 4 billion interactions, measured by one person in the basement of his house. Xiaoji Lu of AlphaMa in Shanghai provided a library of about 130 million molecules. Every molecule shared a center hub, a motif called a triazine, with three spokes. The contest hid three tests. An easier one shared one building block and changed the other two. A harder one shared the hub but no exact building block. The hardest used a different library designed at Leash Bio, with no common hub, no common blocks, and different attachment chemistry. Competitors were not told which test was which. About 2,000 teams entered. The winner did okay where building blocks were shared, and some protein targets improved when only the hub was shared. On the fully different library, no one beat chance.