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AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

deepmind.com

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Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#21

Post by candiodari »

harperlee wrote: post #12

Not knowing a lot about biotechnology, I read the article and it sounds great, but how big is this as a gamechanger? Can someone comment on how big are the implications of this in, let’s say, 5 years from now, on day to day life? Does this mean that biotech is going to explode? Or just that drugs will come to market faster, perhaps cheaper for rare diseases, but from the same industry structure as always?

This will allow us to discover much more about the structure of the cell (of "life") at a before this unprecedented speed. We should find many, many more mechanisms and targets for medicine, but it takes 10-20 years to bring a new medicine to market.

So in 5 years you'll see exactly zero new medicines pop up.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#26

Post by fabian2k »

harperlee wrote: post #12

Not knowing a lot about biotechnology, I read the article and it sounds great, but how big is this as a gamechanger? Can someone comment on how big are the implications of this in, let’s say, 5 years from now, on day to day life? Does this mean that biotech is going to explode? Or just that drugs will come to market faster, perhaps cheaper for rare diseases, but from the same industry structure as always?

Protein folding is a big and important problem, so this is certainly big news if it works as well as it seems. But I wouldn't assume that this changes everything, we can already determine how proteins fold by experimental work. The disadvantage is that this is a lot of work, though the methods there also improved a lot.

One question is how robust the predictions are that DeepMind produces. I would also assume that right now it can't e.g. determine protein structures in the present of other small molecules, or protein complexes. A lot of the interesting stuff lies in the interactions between molecules.

And in general in life sciences any new development will take at least a decade until it hits day to day life, likely even more. We're living with a exception to this rule right now due to the pandemic, but in general things take quite a bit of time in that space.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#27

Post by piyh »

candiodari wrote: post #21
harperlee wrote: post #12

Not knowing a lot about biotechnology, I read the article and it sounds great, but how big is this as a gamechanger? Can someone comment on how big are the implications of this in, let’s say, 5 years from now, on day to day life? Does this mean that biotech is going to explode? Or just that drugs will come to market faster, perhaps cheaper for rare diseases, but from the same industry structure as always?

This will allow us to discover much more about the structure of the cell (of "life") at a before this unprecedented speed. We should find many, many more mechanisms and targets for medicine, but it takes 10-20 years to bring a new medicine to market. So in 5 years you'll see exactly zero new medicines pop up.

No new medicines, but way more biotech tools. Higher yield GMO plants, foundational research into disease, science backed recommendations for lifestyle changes to avoid disease that previously eluded us, some crazy stuff happening in animal models. The progress in biotech the past 20 years makes moore's law look slow.

Re: AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

#30

Post by mabbo »

Sometimes announcements like this are a bit over-the-top. But what really, to me, cements the 'big-deal' of this is the "Median Free-Modelling Accuracy" graph half way down the page.

Scores of 30-45 for 15 years. Now scores of 87-92.

This isn't a minor improvement, it's a leap forward.

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