Scientists are using AI to dream up revolutionary new proteins

Artificial-intelligence tools are helping to scientists to come up with proteins that are shaped unlike anything in nature.Credit: Ian C Haydon/UW Institute for Protein Design In June, South Korean regulators authorized the first-ever medicine, a COVID vaccine, to be made from a novel protein designed by humans. The vaccine is based on a spherical protein'nanoparticle' that was created by researchers nearly a decade ago, through a labour-intensive trial-and error-process1. Now, thanks to gargantuan advances in artificial intelligence (AI), a team led by David Baker, a biochemist at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle, reports in Science2,3 that it can design such molecules in seconds instead of months. 'The entire protein universe': AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein Such efforts are a part of a scientific sea change, as AI tools such as DeepMind's protein-structure-prediction software AlphaFold are embraced by life scientists. In July, DeepMind revealed that the latest version of AlphaFold had predicted structures for every protein known to science.