O Google DeepMind revealed the third major version of its artificial intelligence (IA) “AlphaFold,” designed to help scientists design medicines and target diseases more effectively.
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In 2020, the company made a significant advance in molecular biology by using AI to successfully predict the behavior of microscopic proteins.
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With the latest incarnation of AlphaFold, researchers at DeepMind and sister company Isomorphic Labs – both overseen by co-founder Demis Hassabis – have mapped the behavior of all of life's molecules, including human DNA.
The interactions of proteins – from enzymes crucial to human metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious diseases – with other molecules are essential for drug discovery and development.
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DeepMind said the findings, published in the research journal Nature on Wednesday, would reduce the time and money needed to develop potentially revolutionary treatments.
“With these new capabilities, we can design a molecule that will bind to a specific location on a protein, and we can predict how tightly it will bind,” Hassabis said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“It’s a critical step if you want to design medicines and compounds that will help with disease.”
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The company also announced the launch of the “AlphaFold server,” a free online tool that scientists can use to test their hypotheses before carrying out real-world tests.
Since 2021, AlphaFold's predictions have been freely available to non-commercial researchers, as part of a database containing more than 200 million protein structures, and have been cited thousands of times in other works.
DeepMind said the new server required less computational knowledge, allowing researchers to perform tests with just a few clicks.
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John Jumper, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, said: “It will be very important how much easier the AlphaFold server makes it for biologists – who are experts in biology, not computer science – to test larger, more complex cases.”
Dr Nicole Wheeler, a microbiology expert at the University of Birmingham, said AlphaFold 3 could significantly speed up the drug discovery pipeline, as “physically producing and testing biological designs is a huge bottleneck in biotechnology at the moment”.
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