This will change medicine. It will change scientific research. It will change biotech. It will change everything.”
This statement was made by German molecular biologist Andrei Lupas, and he is just one of many scientists who are wildly enthusiastic about the computer program AlphaFold. In just a few years the program, which uses artificial intelligence, has mapped the shapes of hundreds of thousands of proteins, including one that Andrei Lupas and his colleagues had been trying in vain to crack for more than a decade.
The shapes of proteins are key to drug development against everything from COVID-19 to cancer. Hence AlphaFold is considered one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the century – and the technology behind it, which was developed by the company DeepMind (owned by Google),
