It's impossible to understand what DeepMind and its ilk are doing without first understanding the role that proteins play in human biology. Proteins drive everything in living cells, from enzymes and hormones to antibodies. They are made up of around 20 distinct amino acids, which link together in strings that fold to create a 3D structure, whose shape determines how the protein functions. But figuring out the shape of each protein was historically a very slow, labor-intensive process. That was the big breakthrough that DeepMind achieved with AlphaFold: It meshed machine learning with real biological data to predict the shape of some 200 million protein structures. Armed with such data, scientists can better understand diseases, design new drugs, and even create synthetic proteins for entirely new use cases. That is where Latent Labs enters the fray with its ambition to enable researchers to 'computationally create' new therapeutic molecules from scratch. Simon Kohl (pictured above)...
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