[microSnowball]

I think alphafold gets hated on too much. It won’t revolutionize things but I bet people are out there right now looking at different structures and motifs only seen on alphafold to get a better idea on how existing drugs bind and affect them. And then designing analogues and so on. Time will tell, I guess.

It’s kind of like anything in research, lots of small steps enable revolutionary breakthroughs every so often.

[fabian2k]

You can assume that any known drug target has experimentally determined structures available, once you spend the enormous amounts of effort necessary to put a drug through real clinical trials the effort to determine the target structure is pretty much irrelevant.

Of course there are plenty of drugs where we either don't know where they bind or we're probably wrong about where we think they bind. Or they bind at multiple places and some desirable or non-desirable effect are due to binding at places we don't know yet.

There are real uses to having lots of high-quality structure predictions for proteins. Drug development is something that only get limited benefits here. If you want to know how drugs or drug candidates bind to proteins you first create a protein structure with X-ray crystallography. Then you soak your crystals with your drugs or drug candidates and determine even more structures. The interesting part here is not necessarily the overall fold of the protein (which is mostly what AlphaFold gives you) but e.g. a single hydrogen bond to the drug in the active pocket of the target protein. You need really high-quality data if you want to do any kind of rational drug design, most of the time we still just semi-randomly vary structures until they bind better as far as I understand.

[epistasis]

I think it gets marketed too much and hated on too much.

Given the utter dominance of Google advertising, I think the hating is a necessary counter in order to at least place it in its right place.

Whatever skill Google has computationally is more than matched by their media dominance and public relations prowess.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I find this view very strange. If you apply the same logic to politics, the outcome is pretty grim. And we've been seeing more and more of that.

I don't like hype or hate that's devoid of nuance. But actual scientists working in these fields don't generally pay attention to these things as much as we might. They read the papers, and they have years of training to help them decide what is overhyped and what isn't. I'm not sure what happens on HN or in advertising channels has such a huge bearing on this.

[epistasis]

Actual scientists in the field are usually the ones providing the hate and counterbalance to the massive marketing machine that is Google.

The scientists are not the ones who need the counter-marketing, that's for the people who are not experts and only hear this one achievement (which is significant!) being trumpeted repeatedly as Google maximizes the PR benefits of conducting research.

It's like IBM's Watson play, except that there is at least a some serious meat behind AlphaFold.