Google-parent Alphabet has set up a new lab that will use A.I. to try to discover new drugs

I think an issue is that AlphaFold is only accurate with proteins that have numerous homologous structures that are already resolved experimentally thanks to their use of multisequence alignment in solving the fold. AlphaFold is a great step in the right direction, but it is very far off from accurately predicting a protein structure unless there is large amount of pre-existing data to use. The accuracy of AlphaFold in novel protein sequences with very few to no homologous structures deteriorates rapidly and this was even shown by DeepMind in the AlphaFold 2 paper. I’d just be careful with the accuracy generalization that the media picked up on. It’s definitely not the holy grail people think it is, but it’s certainly like halfway there!

/r/tech Thread Parent Link - cnbc.com