Drug Firms Are Building Their Own Version of AlphaFold
“AlphaFold, the revolutionary, Nobel prize-winning tool for predicting
protein structures, has a problem: it’s running low on data. The latest
version of the artificial intelligence (AI) model, AlphaFold 3, has been
touted as a game-changer for drug discovery, because it can model the
interaction of proteins with other molecules, including drugs. But a lack
of […]
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#^Drug Firms Are Building Their Own Version of AlphaFold“AlphaFold, the revolutionary, Nobel prize-winning tool for predicting protein structures, has a problem: it’s running low on data.
The latest version of the artificial intelligence (AI) model, AlphaFold 3, has been touted as a game-changer for drug discovery, because it can model the interaction of proteins with other molecules, including drugs.
But a lack of examples of these interactions in the data underpinning AlphaFold — hundreds of thousands of publicly available protein structures — is holding the tool back for the applications that drug companies are most interested in, say scientists.
A consortium of leading pharmaceutical companies announced plans today to make their own AlphaFold-3-inspired AI model using thousands of protein structures that are currently secreted away in company vaults. This is in addition to the more than 200,000 protein structures freely available in the Protein Data Bank (PDB).
‘The data that’s missing from the PDB is exactly the data that’s present in our internal data,’ says John Karanicolas, head of computational drug discovery at the pharma company AbbVie in Chicago, Illinois, and part of the effort, called the AI Structural Biology Consortium.
The consortium’s model will be based on OpenFold 3, a fully open-source reproduction of AlphaFold 3 that has been developed by academic researchers (using only publicly available data) and is due to be released in April. But there are no plans to make the consortium’s model available beyond member companies, which include AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi and Boehringer Ingelheim.”
From
Nature.
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Drug Firms Are Building Their Own Version of AlphaFold appeared first on
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