After Almost 50 Years, a Breakthrough in Biology’s ‘Grand Challenge’
An AI system owned by Google’s parent wins a competition to predict how proteins will fold
For the past half century, one of the biggest problems in biology has been predicting how proteins will fold based on the arrangement of their chains of amino acids. Good predictions could speed up progress in drug design, among other things. Today, Google parent Alphabet Inc. announced that an artificial-intelligence system it owns has more or less solved the problem.
AlphaFold 2, a product of Alphabet unit DeepMind Technologies Ltd. in London, took first place in a competition called the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), known as the Olympics of protein folding. AlphaFold scored 92.4 on a scale of 0 to 100 on a series of tests, according to DeepMind. Here is a Bloomberg News story.