The new discovery can change the way we approach diseases.
Alphabet-owned DeepMind announced they developed artificial intelligence that can accurately predict the structure that proteins will fold into in a matter of days, which means that they managed to solve a 50-year-old challenge in biology. This could potentially change we approach diseases and drug discovery.
Every living cell features thousands of different proteins keeping them alive and well and predicting the shape that a protein will fold into allows researchers to define their function and nearly all diseases, including cancer and dementia.
"Proteins are the most beautiful, gorgeous structures and the ability to predict exactly how they fold up is really very, very challenging and has occupied many people over many years," told Professor Dame Janet Thornton from the European Bioinformatics Institute.
DeepMind Co-founder and Chief Executive Demis Hassabis noted that "the ultimate vision behind DeepMind has always been to build general AI, and then use it to help us better understand the world around us by greatly accelerating the pace of scientific discovery."
You can learn more about the project here.
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