Artificial Intelligence is giving drug discovery a great big leap

AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure program, is impressive because it reveals so much fundamental information about living organisms. Proteins are the building blocks of life, after all, and as such they are essential to life and to the development of medicines. Proteins can be drug targets, and they can themselves be drugs. In either case, it is important to know the intricate ways in which they fold into various shapes. Their coils, floppy bits, hidden pockets and sticky patches can control, for example, when a signal is sent between cells or if a process is turned on or off.