Drug discovery school · Curriculum open and free · First cohort forms 2026
Open Bench. A drug discovery lab you can open in a browser.
A free, eight-unit course that takes a middle or high school student from “what even is a disease” to a ranked list of real drug targets they produced themselves. No lab, no license, no fee, no prior biology.
8
units, every lesson plan published in full
$0
to join, to teach it, or to copy it
6–12
grades, split across two tracks
0
pieces of lab equipment required
The idea
Drug discovery is taught, when it is taught at all, to graduate students. The reason given is that you need a lab. That reason stopped being true somewhere around 2021. Target databases, structure prediction, chemical activity data, and trial registries are now free, public, and open in a browser tab.
Open Bench is the course that follows from that fact. Eight hours, eight questions, and at the end a student has produced a ranked list of real drug targets with their own reasoning attached. A twelve-year-old can do the Explorer track. A high school junior on the Builder track finishes with work worth showing a scientist.
It is free permanently, it is published under an open licence, and it is built to be taught by the students who finished it. That last part is the whole design.
The arc
The course is shaped like the pipeline it teaches.
Eight stations, running from a sick person to a treated one. Each unit is one hour and answers one question. Click any station for the full lesson plan.
- Unit 1What a disease actually isWhy does one kid get eczema and the kid next to them doesn't?
- Unit 2Why medicine costs so muchWhy does one new drug cost more than a stadium?
- Unit 3Finding a targetIf a disease is a machine, which part do you break?
- Unit 4Meeting a moleculeWhat makes a molecule a medicine instead of a poison?
- Unit 5Seeing in three dimensionsHow does a molecule know where to go?
- Unit 6Teaching a computer to guessCan a model predict which molecule will work, and should you believe it?
- Unit 7Proving it worksHow do you actually know a medicine helped?
- Unit 8Getting it to everyoneA cure nobody can afford is not a cure. So now what?
Two tracks
Same eight questions. Two depths.
We did not write a watered-down version for younger students. We wrote the same course twice, once with code and once with scissors, drawings, and argument.
Grades 6–8
Explorer
The same eight questions, answered with drawing, sorting, and guided clicking instead of code. A student who has never heard the word protein can start here on day one.
- Starts from
- None. Curiosity and a browser.
- Finishes able to
- Can explain, to an adult, how a medicine is found, why it costs what it costs, and how we know whether it worked.
Grades 9–12
Builder
The same arc, run at full depth. Students query real databases, write small amounts of Python in a notebook, and defend their results against someone trying to poke holes in them.
- Starts from
- One year of biology helps and is not required. No coding experience assumed.
- Finishes able to
- Produces a ranked, annotated target list and a written critique of a published trial, both good enough to submit to the foundation for review.
Why it is different
A course that teaches itself after we leave.
Most youth science programs end when their founder graduates. We designed against that from the first lesson plan.
Students teach students
Ram teaches the first cohort himself. Everyone who finishes the capstone can apply to co-teach the next one. By the third cohort the course runs whether or not its author is in the room, which is the only honest test of whether a curriculum is any good.
Nothing is locked behind a lab
Every tool in all eight units is free and runs on a school Chromebook. No reagents, no licenses, no institutional login. A student in a school with no science budget does the identical work as one at a research university.
The work is real, not practice
The capstone output is a small piece of genuine analysis, reviewed by our research advisor. Work that holds up is published in our journal with the student's name on it and feeds directly into Program P-01.
Everything is open, forever
Lesson plans, slides, notebooks, and answer keys are published under a Creative Commons licence. Any teacher, club, or parent anywhere can run Open Bench without asking us, paying us, or telling us.
The ladder
Four rungs, ending at the one that matters.
Reader
You can open a research paper, find the one comparison it rests on, and say in your own words what it did and did not show.
Finishing Units 1 and 2.
Analyst
You can pull real data out of a public database and defend a ranking you made from it.
Finishing Units 3 through 5.
Builder
You can train a small model, break it on purpose, and explain honestly what it is worth.
Finishing Units 6 through 8 and the capstone.
Teacher
You can run a unit for the next cohort. This is the rung the whole school is built to reach, because it is the one that makes the school outlive any single student.
Co-teaching a unit with a reviewer in the room.
Capstone
Capstone: your first real contribution
Not a poster. A small piece of genuine work, reviewed by our research advisor against the standard we hold ourselves to.
Every submission gets written feedback. Work that holds up is published in our journal under the student's own name, with the foundation credited as reviewer rather than author.
The annotated target list
Extend your Unit 3 ranking to fifteen targets, annotate each with whether a drug already exists against it, and document every source. Strong lists feed directly into Program P-01.
The replication check
Find three public datasets for the same condition and report which findings appear in all three. Replication is unglamorous and it is where real targets come from.
The critique
Take a widely cited paper in allergic disease and write a fair, rigorous appraisal of what it does and does not establish.
The explainer
Write 800 words explaining one hard idea from the course to someone two years younger, and test it on an actual person two years younger.
How to run it
Four ways to use this.
The licence is CC BY 4.0. Adapt it, translate it, teach it for credit. You do not need our permission and we would love to hear about it.
Weekly cohort
Eight consecutive weeks, one hour each, taught live over video with a shared notebook.
Two-day intensive
A weekend version for science clubs and summer programs. Units pair up, four per day.
Self-paced
Every lesson plan, slide outline, and notebook is public. Work through it alone or with a friend.
Classroom drop-in
A teacher can lift any single unit into an existing biology or chemistry class without the other seven.
Questions
What parents and teachers ask.
Does it cost anything?
No, and it never will. Every tool in the curriculum is free, the materials are published under an open licence, and there is no fee to join a cohort.
Do I need to know biology or coding?
No. The Explorer track assumes nothing at all. The Builder track assumes nothing about coding either; the notebooks are prepared and students change values rather than writing programs from scratch.
What equipment do I need?
Any computer with a browser, including a school Chromebook. Nothing in the eight units requires a lab, an install, or a paid account.
Can my teacher run this without you?
Yes, and that is the intent. Every lesson plan on this site is complete enough to teach from, and the licence permits adapting it. You are welcome to tell us, and you do not have to.
Who teaches it?
Ram teaches the first cohort. Students who complete the capstone can apply to co-teach the next one, with a reviewer present. The course is designed to keep running after its author has left for university.
Is this a research internship?
No. It is a course that ends in a small piece of real work. We would rather undersell it than have a student describe it to an admissions officer as something it was not.
Run a classroom, a club, or a community program?
We will help you start a cohort, and we will do it for free. Sponsors who want to fund cohorts in schools that cannot run them alone should also start here.