DeepMind wants to use its AI to cure neglected diseases

In November 2020, Alphabet-owned AI firm DeepMind announced that it had cracked one of biology's trickiest problems. For years the company had been working on an AI called AlphaFold that could predict the structure of proteins – a challenge that could prove pivotal for developing drugs and vaccines, and understanding diseases. When the results of the biennial protein-predicting challenge CASP were announced at the end of 2020, it was immediately clear that AlphaFold had swept the floor with the competition. John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland who co-founded the CASP competition, was both astonished and excited at AlphaFold's potential. "It was the first time a serious scientific problem had been solved by AI," he says.