Increased discovery speed
Cyril Zipfel, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Plant Physiology at the University of Zurich and the Sainsbury Research Institute, has seen research schedules drastically compressed. They used AlphaFold in conjunction with comparative genomics to better understand how plants perceive changes in their environment, paving the way for more resilient crops.
AlphaFold has been cited in over 35,000 papers, and over 200,000 papers have incorporated elements of AlphaFold 2 into their methodology. The quality of the work produced will also improve.
An independent analysis of the impact of AlphaFold 2 conducted by the Innovation Growth Lab suggests that the submission of new experimental protein structures by researchers using AlphaFold 2 has increased by more than 40%. The structures of these proteins are likely to be different from known structures, facilitating the exploration of unknown areas of science. Research related to AlphaFold 2 is also twice as likely to be cited in clinical papers and significantly more likely to be cited in patents than typical research in structural biology.
A new era of digital biology
One of the most exciting examples of AlphaFold’s impact is Isomorphic Labs. Isomorphic Labs is an AI drug discovery company founded in 2021 whose breakthrough models have proven powerful enough to be applied to rational drug design. Since then, Isomorphic Labs has developed an integrated drug design engine that has dramatically changed the way new drugs are designed and accelerated scientific discovery with the ambition to one day solve all diseases.
In collaboration with Isomorphic Labs, we developed AlphaFold 3, which provides an unprecedented perspective on cells that is expected to drive transformation in the drug discovery process and usher in the era of “digital biology.”
The model is designed to predict the structure and interactions of all molecules of life, including not only proteins but also DNA, RNA, and ligands (the small molecules that make up most drugs). It can also generate combined 3D structures of entire molecular complexes, providing a complete picture of how a potential drug molecule binds to a target protein or how a protein interacts with genetic material.
AlphaFold Server makes this technology available to nonprofit researchers around the world, accelerating their ability to develop and test new hypotheses. To date, it has helped thousands of researchers around the world make more than 8 million structure and interaction predictions.
