Using mRNA Technology to create a COVID-19 vaccine in record-time isn’t the only game-changing advancement making the rounds lately. There’s also a mind-blowing breakthrough from Google’s DeepMind Artificial Intelligence known as AlphaFold that solves the problem of protein folding, an advance that was supposed to take decades to figure out.
As Science Alert puts it:
“A long-standing and incredibly complex scientific problem concerning the structure and behaviour of proteins has been effectively solved by a new artificial intelligence (AI) system, scientists report.
DeepMind, the UK-based AI company, has wowed us for years with its parade of ever-advancing neural networks that continually trounce humans at complex games such as chess and Go.
All those incremental advancements were about much more than mastering recreational diversions, however.
In the background, DeepMind’s researchers were seeking to coax their AIs towards solving much more fundamentally important scientific puzzles – such as finding new ways to fight disease by predicting infinitesimal but vitally important aspects of human biology.
Now, with the latest version of their AlphaFold AI engine, they seem to have actually achieved this very ambitious goal – or at least gotten us closer than scientists ever have before.”
The Independent further explains exactly what this breakthrough is all about:
“A 50-year-old science problem has been solved and could allow for dramatic changes in the fight against diseases, researchers say.
For years, scientists have been struggling with the problem of ‘protein folding’ – mapping the three-dimensional shapes of the proteins that are responsible for diseases from cancer to Covid-19.
Google’s Deepmind claims to have created an artificially intelligent program called ‘AlphaFold’ that is able to solve those problems in a matter of days.
If it works, the solution has come ‘decades’ before it was expected, according to experts, and could have transformative effects in the way diseases are treated.”
Transformative because the way things are done now is downright archaic in comparison:
“There are 200 million known proteins at present but only a fraction have actually been unfolded to fully understand what they do and how they work. Even those that have been successfully understood often rely on expensive and time-intensive techniques, with scientists spending years unfolding each structure and relying on equipment that can cost many millions of dollars.”
If this news is true and AlphaFold is really able to analyze protein folds in days not years then this truly could be a transformative breakthrough that revolutionizes healthcare for years to come.
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