In a major scientific advance, the latest version of DeepMind’s AI system AlphaFold has been recognized as a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein structure prediction, often referred to as the ‘protein folding problem’, according to a rigorous independent assessment. This breakthrough could significantly accelerate biological research over the long term, unlocking new possibilities in disease understanding and drug discovery among other fields.
Today, results from CASP14 show that DeepMind’s latest AlphaFold system achieves unparalleled levels of accuracy in structure prediction. The system is able to determine highly-accurate structures in a matter of days. CASP, the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction, is a biennial community-run assessment started in 1994, and the gold standard for assessing predictive techniques. Participants must blindly predict the structure of proteins that have only recently — or in some cases not yet — been experimentally determined, and wait for their predictions to be compared to experimental data.