[skadamou]

Here's the meat of the post:

"To study this, Koff and his collaborators around the world are using existing samples, stored in biobanks, and sequencing vast numbers of crucial lymphocytes, known as B and T cells, each of which contains a unique receptor to recognise parts of viruses, bacteria, or tell-tale signs of cancer cells. Koff’s aim is to create an atlas of these receptors, and feed that information into an AI model to predict what the complete repertoire of B and T cells might look like in young, otherwise healthy individuals, what changes as we age, and what we might be able to do to modulate it."

This seems worthwhile to me but I'm skeptical of an AI's ability to accurately predict biology completely. This is (very loosely) sort of like an AlphaFold for antibodies however, we already know that AlphaFold does not predict unique protein domains well. Maybe this will improve with time - and more protein structures, but fundamentally I don't see how AI could predict the existence of something novel... Similarly, I don't see how this project could accurately map all of the possibilities for B/T cells.