By Steven Rosenbush
Published on March 22, 2023
Meta Platforms Inc.’s new tool predicting the structure of hundreds of millions of proteins is the latest example of a breakthrough in computational biology that began several years ago at an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary.
Some scientists expect the new class of artificial-intelligence systems to accelerate work in the life sciences, particularly drug development.
DeepMind Technologies, the London-based subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, first solved a problem that had been vexing scientists for 50 years using artificial-intelligence as an alternative to much slower and more expensive laboratory techniques for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Those structures are crucial to drug and vaccine development, climate change research and more.