AlphaFold: predicting the protein structure from amino acid sequence for >200 million proteins (awarded @NobelPrize) Today Alpha Genome Atlas: predicting the molecular impact of all 9 billion variants of the human genome

Australian tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham explains how he used ChatGPT/AlphaFold (spent $3,000 with no biology background) to create a custom MRNA vaccine to treat his dog’s cancer tumors. Unreal.

Structures for the protein complexes of more than 2,800 viruses went into the AlphaFold Database this week, free for anyone, academic or commercial. The scale: roughly 1.7 to 1.8 million high-confidence complex predictions across about 2,812 viral proteomes. Around 30% of the protein interactions in it are new to science, not in the Protein Data Bank at all. Why complexes rather than single proteins matters. Joe Grove at Glasgow, part of the effort, put it simply: many viral proteins don't act alone, they work with partners. Viruses had been a blind spot in a database that already covers nearly every catalogued protein & has over three million users. The engineering: AlphaFold2 running on NVIDIA's BioNeMo Inference Runtime, which brought prediction down to minutes per structure at proteome scale. X-ray crystallography takes years & thousands of dollars per structure. The pipeline itself has been open-sourced. Target selection was guided by the UK Health Security Agency's priority pathogen tool, so it's weighted toward viral families known to infect humans. The necessary caveat & Nature ran it prominently: these are predictions, not experiments. They lack the sugar molecules coating many viral proteins - the ones that help viruses evade immune detection, & they'll need experimental confirmation before anyone builds on them. The timing isn't accidental either. It landed alongside a UN General Assembly session on pandemic preparedness. Still, the point stands. The useful version of preparedness is having the structural work already done before you need it, rather than starting the week a new virus arrives.

Still incredible that the DeepMind documentary has footage of exact moment Demis is told that AlphaFold can “easily” predict all known (1-2B) protein sequences “in a month” and he says to do it. Then, it shows the moment AlphaFold is released to the world.

Predicting a protein's structure once took years of lab work. AlphaFold does it in minutes. DeepMind calls this a root node problem – one that unlocks a whole umbrella of others beneath it. Watch Ramine Tinati of @GoogleDeepMind at SuperAI:

I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health. That work started with AlphaFold, and now at @IsomorphicLabs with the mission to reimagine drug discovery and one day solve all disease! We are turbocharging that goal with $2.1B in new funding.

AI'S COOLEST USE ISN'T CHATBOTS. IT'S INVENTING NEW MATTER. -AI is brute-forcing new material combinations humans never tried: spacecraft shielding, heat-dissipating materials for space -DeepMind's AlphaFold 3 folds proteins to find compounds that could cure diseases -@TickerSymbolYOU says work that would take humans forever, done in a design space we've barely touched

A bit of news: After nearly 9 years, I have decided to leave Google DeepMind and join Anthropic (after taking some time to recharge). I am incredibly grateful for my time at GDM. @demishassabis took a real chance letting me lead the AlphaFold team just six months after finishing my PhD, and the entire GDM team taught me so much about how to do great science. GDM is a special place, and I’ll still be excited to hear about what amazing things they discover next.

If Hantavirus mutated into a global threat, it would unleash AI + biotech unlike anything we've ever seen. > genome sequenced and public in 4 hours > AlphaFold maps every protein target > AI screens 10,000 drugs in 24 hrs > 50 vaccine candidates designed simultaneously > AI designed antibodies in days > risk of death computed instantly > decentralized trials launch globally > enroll from home > 20 countries manufacturing at once > first doses in three weeks > real-time dose characterization > your genome + biomarkers determine your protocol > variant map updates every hour No one would wait for governments.