Today, Astera Institute is launching Radial, a division which reimagines how life sciences research happens at a systems level. Radial will be led by Becky Pferdehirt as CEO. We are committing up to $500M over the next decade to expand our build-test-learn approach to scientific infrastructure and practices.
How we fund, do, and build upon science in the U.S. has long needed an update. We’re at a historic inflection point with AI acting as a forcing function on biology — not because it will immediately solve hard problems, but because its demands and widespread adoption will, increasingly, expose how unfit for purpose our scientific infrastructure actually is. We also have more tools than ever before to find new solutions. But positive change isn’t inevitable, which is why Astera is expanding its efforts through Radial.
Radial is grounded in two key beliefs. First, scientific practices for impactful discovery—from how we design methods to how new knowledge is shared and translated into real-world use—need to be rebuilt from the ground up. Second, it’s very difficult to go about this without deliberate iteration through active research efforts. In other words, we need to experiment with how science is done through actual science and scientists.
Our starting framework
Radial is going to try a broader range of things in the beginning that will drive our own evolution. We will be looking for more radical experiments that can give more information about what’s possible, regardless of whether they succeed or fail in the classic sense. We will iterate on:
- What science gets done.
We are thinking about what gets funded as well as what scientists decide to work on in the first place. We have more ways than ever to traverse the white space with data and modeling, not just opinions and trends. And we’re happy to work with anyone and any sector that prioritizes impact, utility, and metascience experimentation.
For example, we’re working with industry partners to leverage existing tools and laboratory infrastructure to generate open, high-quality datasets. With OpenADMET, we are characterizing small molecule properties—ADME and toxicity—that can be explored and trained on for real-world utility. We think there could be more general potential here: leverage unique cutting edge platform capabilities from start-ups and point them at public good problems. It’s kind of the inverse of Focused Research Organizations (non-profit start-ups), and we think there could one day be a more generalizable model here that addresses distinct gaps in a complementary way.
- How science is organized.
Our institutions are built for an era that emphasizes discrete projects and individual achievement. Many scientific challenges today require truly multidisciplinary or multi-sector teams holistically redesigning all components of technical systems (data, methods, and projects). This requires a lot of time, experimentation, and willingness to step outside dominant incentive structures to first figure out what works.
As an example, The Diffuse Project is our first major in-house program for understanding protein motion by co-developing the necessary experimental methods, computational models, data standards, and infrastructure. Our goal is to make dynamic structural biology data as foundational as the Protein Data Bank has been for static structures and to scale the data through broad methodological adoption.
- The outputs of science.
To accelerate scientific progress, we need to realign our infrastructure, metadata, and research artifacts around how AI-empowered scientists will actually work. We also need to build interoperable solutions so that advances compound across the ecosystem. We’re at a rare moment to shed the historical constraints on research sharing that have kept science from reaching its potential. The path forward is full of unknowns, which is where we feel most at home: testing what others don’t yet have the chance to try, and sharing what we learn along the way.
Among many other efforts, we are currently developing The Stacks, an open-access digital platform to experiment with how scientific, technical, and intellectual work is shared and discovered. It’s a publishing infrastructure prototype that we hope to innovate upon to help iterate towards what science actually needs from first principles for machine readability, rapid iteration, and genuine reuse.
Why now?
While we’ve been working in this area for a few years, we’ve needed a few things to fall into place before expanding. First, we needed to try a bunch of approaches to develop conviction around a starting framework worth expanding on. Second, we needed the right leadership team to take it to the next level.
I could not be more excited to share that Becky Pferdehirt has joined as Radial CEO. I’ve known Becky for over a decade and watched with admiration as she’s successfully worn many different hats as a scientist. Becky joins from Andreessen Horowitz, where she was an Investing Partner at a16z Bio + Health. Becky was previously an R&D Scientist at Genentech and held research and business development roles at Amgen. She has a PhD from UC Berkeley and a BS from MIT. If you’ve ever interacted with Becky, you also know that she is an exceptionally sharp, creative, and flexible thinker who acts with integrity – all critical for quickly imagining and exploring new directions for basic and translational science. Becky will be working closely with me and Prachee Avasthi, our Head of Open Science, as she takes the reins on Radial.
Joining her is Stephanie Wankowicz as Scientific Program Director of The Diffuse Project, our research initiative focused on protein dynamics. She will be leading its expansion. We are so grateful to Stephanie for fully taking the leap from her current post at Vanderbilt University, where she ran her own lab developing computational algorithms to model conformational ensembles from X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM data.
Becky and Stephanie will be working closely with several others, including Sekhar Ramakrishnan, who joins from The Swiss Data Center as Engineering Lead for The Stacks, our experimental publishing platform that we are developing and building through programs like Diffuse. Steven Moss has also joined us from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology as a new full-time Science Policy Associate to help think about how we scale change at a national level.
Join us
Radial is adaptable by design. We are building programs in-house, funding external teams with multi-year grants, investing in companies, and designing public-private partnerships across government, academia, and industry. We’re looking for people who are willing to take risks and treat informative failures like a badge of honor.
For all of our roles, we’re excited about candidates who will lead by example, shifting perceptions of what’s possible before it’s popular to do so.
For technical leadership: We’re searching for a Head of Bio AI to lead AI across Radial programs. [Apply here]
For structural biology and protein dynamics: Scientists, engineers, and operators for the Diffuse team. [Apply here]
For ambitious ideas that need space: Astera’s 2026 residency program has slots for projects that don’t fit existing funding models. [Apply here]
For new models of partnership: Companies, national labs, academic institutions—if you’re thinking about how your capabilities could be pointed at public-good science, let’s talk.
For working scientists facing bottlenecks: We’re launching an essay competition inviting active scientists to describe a concrete research challenge caused by structural bottlenecks, and experimental strategies to fix them. [Learn more.]
Get involved:
- Join the team: Open positions
- Residency program: Apply by April 19th
- Partnerships: Contact us
- Essay competition: Tell us about your bottlenecks