More efficient drug discovery is one of the great promises of AI in health and medicine. In their fascinating DLD Future Hub conversation, Simon Kohl (Latent Labs) and Kevin Slavin explore how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing biology, as it helps scientits to design novel proteins with unprecedented precision, heralding an era of “generative biology.”
Human bodies are made up of roughly 20,000 different types of proteins and “really significant for our health”, Kohl explains. Traditionally, understanding their 3D structure – which is critical for drug discovery – involved painstaking, months-long lab experiments.
DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI, which Kohl helped create, dramatically changed this by accurately predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences using AI. This breakthrough, recognized with a Nobel Prize, now allows scientists to “visualize protein structures” with experimental-level accuracy, Kohl explains.
However, AlphaFold merely reads existing biology. “It lets you see nature”, Kohl says, but it doesn’t change the proteins. “It doesn’t create new drugs.”
This is what Kohl aims to do with his company Latent Labs, which aims to “generate proteins from scratch, not found in nature, that are highly precise, that interact with biology, and that are great starting points for drugs.”
Watch the video for details on AI in drug discovery and how the process can make the development of new medication both faster and more cost-effective.
