We are seeing the birth of a revolution in the world of biology. AlphaFold, DeepMind’s artificial intelligence, has just expanded its database to incredible levels. Two years after its arrival, AlphaFold is already capable of offering information on more than 200 million proteins. What it means, according to those responsible, the information from “every organism on Earth whose genome has been sequenced“.
AlphaFold, in collaboration with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), is a software that very precisely predicts the molecular structure of proteins. An enormously useful information to be able to know precisely how they work. And later to be able to develop medicines and treat diseases. Because the best thing about AlphaFold is not only its enormous calculation potential to understand biology, but also that all this information is available to the entire scientific community.
“AI’s greatest contribution to scientific knowledge to date”
The scope of AlphaFold is enormous, to the point that Pushmeet Kohli, director of AI at DeepMind, calls it “AI’s greatest contribution to scientific knowledge to date.”
Until now, understanding the complex structure of each protein required long and tedious experiments to verify its final shape and be able to design specific drugs. Now, that job is done by AI with extremely high precision. Y in just one year he has managed to multiply his knowledge by 200.
In July 2021, DeepMind published what was already the most complete map of human proteins to date with nearly 1 million structures. Now DeepMind has not only published that map again, but has expanded it to 200 million protein structures to cover basically all known living organisms and match virtually all scientific knowledge to date.
The speed with which AI is able to understand the structure of proteins is much faster than what humans can do manually. To match the work of AlphaFold, humans without this technology would have taken thousands of years.
DeepMind is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, has described research as a “giant milestone”. AlphaFold’s outreach is already bearing fruit in the form of other companies, such as the creation of Isomorphic Labs, a company dedicated to creation of new drugs based on AI calculations.
“Determining the 3D structure of a protein used to take many months or years, now it takes seconds. With this new addition of structures that describe almost the entire universe of proteins, we can expect more biological mysteries to be solved every day“, described Eric Topol, director of Scripps Research, one of the most prestigious biomedical centers in the world.
