1 week Ago By Thomas Claburn
Google and DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs has developed an AI model called AlphaFold 3 that can, it's claimed, predict the structure of molecules more accurately than existing tools. According to DeepMind's co-founder, AlphaFold 3 "can predict the structures and interactions of nearly all of life's molecules with state-of-the-art accuracy including proteins, DNA and RNA." It's hoped the system can be used to design drugs and treatments faster and more accurately than current methods, and research suggests that may be the case.
AlphaFold 3 attempts to predict the 3D structures of biomolecular complexes from descriptions of those complexes; this is potentially useful for doing things like developing drugs that are a better fit for a specific application. "This breakthrough opens up exciting possibilities for drug discovery, allowing us to rationally develop therapeutics against targets that were previously difficult or deemed intractable to modulate," declared Isomorphic Labs, in a blog post . According to an article in the science journal Nature, AlphaFold 3 is "capable of high accuracy prediction of complexes containing nearly all molecular types present in the Protein Data Bank " – a tool for visualizing molecular structures.
The developers claim their AI model offers a 50 percent improvement over existing prediction methods on the PoseBusters benchmark , and that in certain categories of molecular interactions, it has doubled prediction accuracy. The AI model improves u.
