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by mckn1ght 65 days ago
What is your opinion on AlphaFold? Doesn’t that provide a speedup for one part of medication development and understanding disease?
1 comments

Not really, you still have to validate the structures it estimates, which minimises any speed gains.

It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.

In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.