Artificial Intelligence

The fight against disease has changed thanks to Google AI.

It was DeepMind's turn with AlphaFold, which has solved a question from almost 50 years ago and has meant one of the biggest challenges for the scientific community, opening the field to new drugs and effective alternatives in the fight against diseases.

Since 2016, DeepMind started working at AlphaFold, demonstrating the potential of its AI, and just one year ago, it presented a study on the potential of its AI system to predict protein folding.

Remember that proteins are essential for life, they are large and complex molecules, composed of chains of amino acids, discovering exactly how proteins fold is known as the "protein folding problem", and it has become a great challenge for biology scholars, since 50 years ago.

Despite the statements of molecular biologist Cyrus Levinthal in 1969, when he declared that trying to know the possible configurations of a protein would take more time to discover such a process than the life of our universe, research on this issue was never stopped.

It was so much the effort to discover and know the folding of proteins that CASP (Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction) was developed, whose objective is to test new predictive techniques on the subject.

CASP is carried out every two years, whose score goes from 0 to 100, being this last one the best possible effectiveness, this year, the fourteenth CAST, AphaFold obtained a score of 92.4, standing out over other one hundred equipments.

This advance will allow to improve the understanding of the known diseases, besides being a key factor when facing a pandemic or epidemic.

DeepMind has just made a great leap forward in solving and understanding one of the great questions of molecular biology, opening a door to a future biomedical revolution, which will undoubtedly occur sooner than expected.

19 de Enero, 2021