DeepMind wants to fight coronavirus with Alphafold-AI

Deepmind’s AI software Alphafold is said to help researchers find a vaccine.

DeepMind — AlphaFold

If researchers know the structure of a protein, they can better assess its function and effects. In the context of the corona virus, for example, this could accelerate the development of medicines .

However, researching and modeling a protein structure is complex and can take months or longer. Researchers therefore use software that predicts protein structures based on amino acids.

Alphafold folds proteins particularly effectively

At the end of 2018, Deepmind presented the AI-based protein forecasting software Alphafold for the first time, which took first place out of a total of 98 teams in a protein folding competition. She predicted the most accurate structure in 25 out of 43 proteins — the software in second place was correct in only three out of 43 proteins.

This is how it looks when Alphafold uses amino acids to predict the structure of a protein. Picture: Deepmind

Deepmind co-founder Demis Hassabis described the competition as a “key moment” that showed how AI could solve “fundamental, very important and real scientific problems”.