AlphaFold

In a packed panel discussion at GTC, moderated by NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang, the architects of the groundbreaking transformer model gathered to explore their creation’s potential. The panel featured seven of the eight authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need Paper” paper, which introduced transformers — a type of neural network…

AI in drug discovery is a topic that gets an outsized amount of attention, observes Carl Hansen, CEO of AbCellera, a company specializing in antibody drug discovery. “It’s as if people are saying, ‘AI is here, it’s going to save us. Thank God, we’re finally gonna be able to create drugs,” he said. “To me,…

Big Pharma and researchers are sharpening their focus on AI to speed drug discovery. But the path to fully AI-driven drug discovery faces substantial hurdles, according to Adityo Prakash, CEO of Verseon. “When it comes to drug discovery, AI has a data problem with which the pharmaceutical industry has not yet come to terms,” he…

An international group of researchers employed DeepMind’s deep learning-driven AlphaFold protein structure database to design and synthesize a potential hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) drug in only 30 days. The AI drug discovery project consisted of Insilico Medicine, the University of Toronto’s Acceleration Consortium and researchers including Nobel laureate Michael Levitt. The team applied AlphaFold to Insilico’s…

At the Nvidia GTC 2023, DeepMind’s Founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, provided an in-depth look into the seismic potential of their protein folding AI system, AlphaFold. Hassabis said AlphaFold was a contender for the organization’s “biggest project to date.” Hassabis noted that DeepMind’s AlphaFold has made strides in addressing the protein folding problem, a challenge…

Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind has announced that its AI system AlphaFold has predicted the structure of more than 200 million proteins, representing almost every known cataloged protein. In addition, AlphaFold and its partner, the EMBL‘s European Bioinformatics Institute, announced that the recent release expanded the database by more than 200 fold, from almost 1 million to…

Early in my career, my manager used the phrase in the above headline to highlight the difficulty inherent in drug discovery. Over the ensuing years, I have seen that statement repeatedly confirmed by the brutal attrition in the discovery and development of new drugs. There are so many variables that can kill a drug discovery…

A Google-owned lab has accurately predicted protein structures, potentially paving the way toward advances in drug discovery. London-based DeepMind lab has developed a deep-learning program known as AlphaFold that bested roughly 100 efforts to predict protein structures in a contest known as Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP). Such proteins are found within the cells…