When AI weds molecular biology, miracle treatments are born

livemint.com:

To understand life," says The Economist, “you must understand proteins. These molecular chains, each assembled from a menu of twenty types of amino acids, do biology’s heavy lifting. In the guise of enzymes, they catalyze the chemistry that keeps bodies running.

Actin and Myosin, the proteins of muscles, permit those bodies to move around. Keratin provides their skin and hair. Haemoglobin carries their oxygen.

Insulin regulates their metabolism. And a protein called spike allows coronaviruses to invade human cells, thereby shutting down entire economies." Proteins are the origin of existence; the tail of a human sperm is a structure composed of many types of proteins that work together to form a complex rotary engine that propels the sperm forward to fertilize an egg and create life. It is not surprising, therefore, that the breakthrough that made me a convert to the religion of AI had to do with proteins.

AlphaFold by Google DeepMind cracked one of the hardest problems in medical science—predicting how a protein would fold. Every carbon-based life form is made of proteins, and it is how they fold that decides almost everything about our physiology and life. There are over 200 million known proteins today, and each of them folds in a unique three-dimensional shape.

It was impossible for scientists to study each one of them, which considerably hindered efforts to tackle disease. If proteins fold wrongly, for instance, they can cause horrific harm—Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, and thousands of diseases we do not know yet. DeepMind built on an existing product AlphaGo (the one that famously defeated world champion Lee Sedol in the complex game of Go) to study the sequences and structures