Increasing speed of discovery
Cyril Zipfel, professor of Molecular & Cellular Plant Physiology on the University of Zurich and Sainsbury Lab, saw research timelines shrink drastically. They used AlphaFold alongside comparative genomics to higher understand how plants perceive changes of their environment, paving the best way for more resilient crops.
AlphaFold has been cited in greater than 35,000 papers and greater than 200,000 papers incorporated elements of AlphaFold 2 of their methodology. It’s also enhancing the standard of labor being produced.
An independent evaluation of AlphaFold 2’s impact, carried out by the Innovation Growth Lab, suggests that researchers using AlphaFold 2 see a rise of over 40% of their submission of novel experimental protein structures. Those protein structures usually tend to be dissimilar to known structures, encouraging the exploration of uncharted areas of science. Also, research linked to AlphaFold 2 is twice as more likely to be cited in clinical articles, and is significantly more more likely to be cited by a patent, than typical works in structural biology.
A brand new era of digital biology
Some of the exciting examples of AlphaFold’s impact is Isomorphic Labs – an AI drug discovery company founded in 2021 when the breakthrough model proved to be powerful enough to be applied to rational drug design. Isomorphic Labs has since developed a unified drug design engine to dramatically change the way it designs latest medicines and speed up scientific discovery with an ambition to at some point solve all diseases.
Along with Isomorphic Labs, we developed AlphaFold 3, which offers an unprecedented view into cells that we expect to drive a metamorphosis of the drug discovery process and usher in an era of “digital biology.”
The model is designed to predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules — not only proteins, but DNA, RNA, and ligands (the small molecules that make up most drugs). It could also generate the joint 3D structures of entire molecular complexes, allowing a holistic view of how a possible drug molecule binds to its goal protein, or how proteins interact with genetic material.
The AlphaFold Server is empowering non-commercial researchers globally to harness this technology, accelerating their ability to formulate and test latest hypotheses. To date, it’s helped make greater than 8 million folds – predictions of structures and interactions – for hundreds of researchers all over the world.
