The Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) congratulates Benjamin Haibe-Kains on being named the 2026 recipient of the Francis Ouellette Community Award, presented by the Canadian Bioinformatics Hub. The award recognizes early- and mid-career leaders who have made exceptional contributions to strengthening Canada’s bioinformatics, computational biology, and data science ecosystem.

For those at SGC and across the Target 2035 community, the recognition reflects Benjamin’s longstanding commitment to open science and his vision for making cutting-edge computational methods accessible to researchers worldwide.

One of his most significant contributions has been the development of AIRCHECK (Artificial Intelligence-Ready CHEmiCal Knowledge base), an open platform designed to power the next generation of AI-driven drug discovery. As machine learning becomes increasingly important in identifying new medicines, one of the field’s biggest limitations has been access to large, standardized, high-quality experimental datasets. AIRCHECK addresses that challenge by making protein–ligand interaction data openly available in formats specifically designed for artificial intelligence applications.

The platform has become a cornerstone of Target 2035’s strategy to identify a pharmacological modulator for every human protein. Beyond hosting datasets, AIRCHECK has fostered an active global community through workshops, benchmarking activities, and partnerships that bring together data scientists and experimental researchers to develop and validate new AI models.
As AIRCHECK continues to grow alongside Target 2035, this national recognition highlights the impact that open scientific platforms and community-building can have on the future of medicine.

Congratulations to Benjamin on this well-deserved honour and on his continued leadership in advancing open science, artificial intelligence, and collaborative drug discovery.

Find more information about AIRCHECK: https://aircheck.ai/ 
Read the first publication from AIRCHECK: https://chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10.26434/chemrxiv.15001454/v1