Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation. It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease. On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled a more powerful version of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the cells in the human body. An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.” Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body. Biologists spent years or even decades trying to pinpoint the shape of individual proteins. Then AlphaFold came along. When a scientist fed this technology a string of amino acids that make up a protein, it could predict the three-dimensional shape within minutes. When DeepMind publicly released AlphaFold a year later, biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, used the technology as they worked to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others used it as they struggled to find remedies for malaria and Parkinson’s disease.

Full report : Alphabet unveils Google DeepMind’s next generation of drug discovery AI model called AlphaFold3.