🧬Medical Breakthroughs Thanks to AlphaFold
Last year, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving the problem of predicting the 3D structure of a protein based on its composition—the decades-old scientific challenge.
Unveiled by Google DeepMind in 2018, the AlphaFold model reached unprecedented accuracy in predicting the 3D structure of proteins. AlphaFold2, released in 2020, revealed the database with almost all 250 million proteins known to mankind.
By comparison, over 60 years of laboratory experiments had identified only 225,000 protein formulas. Now, years of research are stacked into seconds of calculations ⤴️
"If the first generation of drug discovery was the nature generation, which gave us aspirin (from willow tree bark), and the second was the biotech generation, which gave us Ozempic, then we've now moved to the third generation: the AI generation," explains Samuel Hume, professor at the Department of Oncology at Oxford.
What AlphaFold has already helped discover:
💠 The model helped predict the structure of the serotonin receptor, one of the hormones responsible for mood. The AI tested which of the 1.6 billion molecules could effectively bind to the receptor, which could pave the way to new drugs for mood disorders.
💠 Using AlphaFold, scientists were able to develop a new liver cancer drug that has shown efficacy in the lab (but not yet on patients).
💠 Another development thanks to AlphaFold is a "molecular syringe," which delivers the desired proteins directly into human cells. This will be handy in gene therapy and cancer treatments.
💠 The model can design new molecules and model the structure of mutations. This could transform the diagnosis and treatment of rare genetic diseases.
💠 AlphaFold recently revealed the structure of the molecular "bridge" between the sperm and egg that forms during fertilization, which might be useful in treating infertility.
Now, the model is being used to find more effective malaria vaccines and drugs for Parkinson's disease and to solve the antibiotic resistance problem.
More on the topic:
🔬 How Google DeepMind's AlphaFold Is Transforming Biology and Pharma
