Up­dat­ed: Deep­Mind's Al­phaFold now con­tains struc­ture of 200M pro­teins. What does that mean for drug R&D?

When Al­phaFold first came out, it de­buted with the promise of in­creas­ing the num­ber of pro­tein struc­tures that could be pre­dict­ed, a move that had elud­ed re­searchers for decades and could prove to be­come a cru­cial step to mov­ing drug de­vel­op­ment to a new height.

Now, Al­phaFold says its data­base of pro­tein struc­tures has been mas­sive­ly ex­pand­ed.

Google’s AI out­fit and the Eu­ro­pean Mol­e­c­u­lar Bi­ol­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry’s Eu­ro­pean Bioin­for­mat­ics In­sti­tute (EM­BL-EBI) an­nounced Thurs­day that Deep­Mind’s Al­phaFold data­base now con­tains the struc­tures of more than 200 mil­lion pro­teins. It’s a sub­stan­tial jump from where it was a year ago when Deep­Mind an­nounced that it had pre­dict­ed the struc­ture of on­ly about 350,000 pro­teins.

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