How DeepMind’s protein-folding breakthrough could transform drug development

An AI system developed by Google‘s DeepMind has made a “once in a generation” breakthrough that could have a dramatic impact on the way we treat diseases: accurately predicting how proteins fold into shapes. Proteins underpin almost every biological process. Each one is comprised of strings of amino acids that fold into countless elaborate shapes that determine what they do. Predicting these structures can help us understand how proteins cause diseases — and develop drugs to treat them. But scientists currently know the exact 3D shapes of just a fraction of the 200 million-plus proteins they’ve identified. [Read: How to build a search engine…

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