Inventing Drugs Is One of the Most Exciting Uses of AI
The AlphaFold tool has made another leap toward making the design of new treatments faster and cheaper.
Humans, go home. AI will take it from here.
Photographer: ose Sarmento Matos/BloombergAlphabet’s artificial intelligence subsidiary, Google DeepMind, has yet again knocked the socks off scientists with its latest iteration of AlphaFold, using the tool to illuminate the intricate dance between some of life’s most important molecules. It’s an important leap towards a world where technology enables a deeper understanding of human biology and, hopefully, improves our ability to discover new drugs.
It was only two years ago that DeepMind’s earlier version of AlphaFold blew the scientific community’s mind by revealing images of every existing protein on earth — 200 million of them. Those images weren’t perfect – they were predictions, not actual snapshots — but even so, they cracked open a raft of possibilities, from speeding basic science to improving the design of new treatments.