Derek Lowe is rightfully pointing out that protein structures (AlphaFold's main purpose) is not the rate limiting step in drug discovery today. Other articles o

Derek Lowe is rightfully pointing out that protein structures (AlphaFold's main purpose) is not the rate limiting step in drug discovery today. Other articles overhype AlphaFold's achievements and this one pours water on that, a natural balance in the commentary from the scientific community. AlphaFold is still a great achievement. In the long term, the biggest impact won't be the model itself, but the demonstration that hard biological problems can be tackled, with high accuracy, with deep learning. Toxicity, specificity, and candidate generation are all super-problems that are the limiting steps today. These will be broken down into sub-problems and eventually tackled by machine learning models once we have the data and understanding to do so.