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

Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding: The Bitter Lesson of Biology, Virtual Cells, & Curing All Disease @GoogleDeepMind’s @pushmeet and @biohub’s @salcandido explain why AlphaFold's breakthrough hasn't solved protein dynamics, why scaling AI compute and data alone isn't enough to understand biology, how protein language models contain hidden knowledge about structure, function, and evolution, why future frontier models may understand other AI systems better than humans, how better biological data and virtual cells could unlock the next wave of breakthroughs, and what it will take to achieve 10–100x faster drug discovery on the path to curing all disease.

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.

a truth hidden in plain sight: every big tech and frontier lab is going to become a bio company - google: demis' alphafold & isomorphic - meta & microsft: esm & bioemu protein models - nvidia: bionemo software stack for biochemical models, joint lab with eli lilly - openai & anthropic: both making the rounds about breaking into bio, strong bio reasoning models, wet lab - elon's empire: likely crossover between neuralink and xai (eg controlling ai with ur mind) - apple & amazon: not as frontier, but consumer health devices, onemedical acquisition, pharmacy mastering the most complex machine created by nature/god (the human body) is the ultimate test of superintelligence

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