AlphaFold was considered by the journal Science as the breakthrough of the year in 2021. In 2022, it was the most cited research paper in AI. “People have been on for many decades and were not able to make that much progress,” Kohli says. “Then came AI.” DeepMind also released the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database—which contained the protein structures of almost every organism whose genome has been sequenced—making it freely available to scientists worldwide. More than 1.
” For instance, one of DeepMind’s early partners, the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, used AlphaFold to develop medicine for diseases that affect millions—such as sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis—yet receive comparatively little research. DeepMind’s latest breakthrough is called AlphaMissense. The model categorizes the so-called missense mutations—genetic alterations that can result in different amino acids being produced at particular positions in proteins.