New study uses AlphaFold and AI to accelerate design of novel drug for liver cancer

New research uses AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered protein structure database, to accelerate the design and synthesis of a drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of primary liver cancer. It is the first successful application of AlphaFold to hit identification process in drug discovery. This study by an international team of researchers, published last week in Chemical Science, is led by the University of Toronto's Acceleration Consortium director Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, and Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov. AI is revolutionizing drug discovery and development. In 2022, the AlphaFold computer program, developed by Alphabet's DeepMind, predicted protein structures for the whole human genome––a remarkable breakthrough in both AI applications and structural biology.