DeepMind wants to use its AI to cure neglected diseases
In November 2020, Alphabet-owned AI firm DeepMind announced that it had cracked one of biology’s trickiest problems. For years the company had been working on an AI called AlphaFold that could predict the structure of proteins – a challenge that could prove pivotal for developing drugs and vaccines, and understanding diseases. When the results of the biennial protein-predicting challenge CASP were announced at the end of 2020, it was immediately clear that AlphaFold had swept the floor with the competition.
John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland who co-founded the CASP competition, was both astonished and excited at AlphaFold’s potential. “It was the first time a serious scientific problem had been solved by AI,” he says. “The prospect of having high quality computed structures for most proteins will be a terrific help in understanding many aspects of biology. For example, next time we have a pandemic, we could much more rapidly identify possible drug strategies.”
Earlier in 2020, predictions released by AlphaFold at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic provided a little hint of what was to come. In late January, DeepMind’s scientists used the program to map out a number of the Sars-CoV-2 virus’ proteins – predictions which were later experimentally confirmed to be accurate. This information was then used by virologists around the world, as they scrambled to understand how the virus was behaving.
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