Artificial intelligence is giving machines the ability to generate videos, write computer code, and even conduct conversations.
Efforts to understand the human body and fight disease are also accelerating.
On Wednesday, the tech giant's central artificial intelligence laboratory, Google DeepMind, and its sister company Isomorphic Labs announced the launch of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive cells. A powerful version has been released. human body.
An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had puzzled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called the “protein folding problem.”
Proteins are tiny molecules that control the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as a series of compounds and then twist and fold into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.
Biologists have spent years, even decades, pinpointing the shape of individual proteins. Then along came AlphaFold. Scientists fed the technology a sequence of amino acids that make up a protein, and within minutes it was able to predict its three-dimensional shape.
A year later, DeepMind made AlphaFold public, and biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco used this technology to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others were struggling to find treatments for malaria and Parkinson's disease.
This type of technology is expected to greatly streamline the development of new drugs and vaccines.
“It tells us a lot more about how the cell's machinery interacts,” said Google DeepMind researcher John Jumper. “It tells us how this is supposed to work and what happens when we get sick.”
A new version of AlphaFold, AlphaFold3, extends the technology beyond protein folding. In addition to predicting the shape of proteins, it can also predict the behavior of other microscopic biological mechanisms, such as DNA, where the body stores genetic information, and RNA, which transfers information from DNA to proteins.
“Biology is a dynamic system. We need to understand the interactions between different molecules and structures,” said Demis, CEO of Google DeepMind and founder of Isomorphic Labs, which is also owned by Google.・Mr. Hassabis says: “This is a step in that direction.”
The company provides a website where scientists can use AlphaFold3. Other labs, particularly those at the University of Washington, offer similar technology. In a paper published in the scientific journal Nature on Tuesday, Jumper and his fellow researchers showed that it achieves a level of precision that far exceeds state-of-the-art technology.
The technology has the potential to “save months of laboratory work and enable research that was previously impossible,” said Tamarind Bio, a startup building technology to accelerate drug discovery. said Deniz Kavi, co-founder and CEO. “This represents a great promise.”