Communications of the ACM
London AI Lab Claims Breakthrough That Could Accelerate Drug Discovery
DeepMind said on Monday its AlphaFold system had solved what is known as the protein folding problem.
Credit: DeepMind
Some scientists spend their lives trying to pinpoint the shape of tiny proteins in the human body.
Proteins are the microscopic mechanisms that drive the behavior of viruses, bacteria, the human body and all living things. They begin as strings of chemical compounds, before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define what they can do — and what they cannot.
For biologists, identifying the precise shape of a protein often requires months, years or even decades of experimentation. It requires skill, intelligence and more than a little elbow grease. Sometimes they never succeed.
Now, an artificial intelligence lab in London has built a computer system that can do the job in a few hours — perhaps even a few minutes.
DeepMind, a lab owned by the same parent company as Google, said on Monday that its system, called AlphaFold, had solved what is known as "the protein folding problem." Given the string of amino acids that make up a protein, the system can rapidly and reliably predict its three-dimensional shape.
From The New York Times
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