Known as the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), the 3-decade-old competition has run out of funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will exhaust emergency support from the University of California (UC) Davis, which oversees the grant, on 8 August. UC Davis has told the two researchers who run the program that their jobs will end in weeks.

NIH officials have offered no reassurance about the program’s future, despite repeated inquiries from CASP organizers, who submitted a request to renew their $800,000 grant last year. The agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment. John Moult, a CASP co-founder at the University of Maryland, says contest organizers are “scrambling” to find alternative funding from foundations and other countries

CASP nears end

Known as the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP), the 3-decade-old competition has run out of funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will exhaust emergency support from the University of California (UC) Davis, which oversees the grant, on 8 August. UC Davis has told the two researchers who run the program that their jobs will end in weeks.

NIH officials have offered no reassurance about the program’s future, despite repeated inquiries from CASP organizers, who submitted a request to renew their $800,000 grant last year. The agency did not respond to multiple requests for comment. John Moult, a CASP co-founder at the University of Maryland, says contest organizers are “scrambling” to find alternative funding from foundations and other countries

We know who we can thank for this...

CASP co-founder John Moult told STAT that Google-owned DeepMind will make a one-time gift to support the Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction, better known as CASP. No amount was disclosed, but the gift will support CASP for approximately 12 months.

CASP17 will be held in May-August 2026.

Details of the experiment will be posted here soon.