While many businesses continue to seek AI’s killer app, biochemists have already found it. That application is protein folding. This week marks the five-year anniversary of the debut of Alpha Fold 2, the AI system created by Google DeepMind that can predict the structure of a protein from its DNA sequence with a high degree of accuracy.
In those five years, AlphaFold 2 and its successor AI models have become almost as fundamental and ubiquitous tools of biochemical research as microscopes, petri dishes, and pipettes. The AI models have begun to transform the way scientists search for new medicines, promising faster and more successful drug development. And they are starting to help scientists work on solutions to everything from ocean pollution to creating crops that are more resilient to climate change.
“The impact has really exceeded all of our expectations,” John Jumper, the senior Google DeepMind scientist who leads the company’s protein structure prediction team, told Fortune. In 2024, Jumper and Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work creating AlphaFold 2.
