Why AlphaFold won’t revolutionise drug discovery

By Derek Lowe2022-08-05T12:24:00

Ribbon 3D spinning gif showing AF-Q8W3K0-F1

Source: Data source: AlphaFold/EMBL-EBI/PDB Q8WW3K0/Royal Society of Chemistry

Protein structure prediction is a hard problem, but even harder ones remain

DeepMind’s AlphaFold team has been having quite a run of success in predicting protein structures. This has long been considered one of the truly difficult problems in computational biology, and AlphaFold has made extraordinary progress over the last year or two.

I have no desire to take anything away from this success. It really is impressive. But some of the headlines have betrayed real misunderstandings about what’s been accomplished.