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We're talking about biomedical science here. Things move slowly because the domain is exceptionally complex and human lives are in the balance. AlphaFold catap

We're talking about biomedical science here. Things move slowly because the domain is exceptionally complex and human lives are in the balance. AlphaFold catapulted protein structure prediction forward, and it's hard to overstate how important understanding protein structure is in modern drug development As an example of how this will be used to help actual people, here's a paper that uses AlphaFold to identify the parts of cancer-associated proteins that interact with each other. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pro.4479 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pro.4479 The obvious next step is to develop drugs that disrupt these interactions and thereby disrupt cancer. But, it's going to take years, maybe decades before any drug resulting from this research is in actual patients. There are dozens of other papers like this.

TaupeRanger 3y ago
And yet, even after 5 years there's no sign of any real, meaningful drugs, even just Phase I trials. In 5 - 10 years (which will be 10 to 15 years after AlphaFold was released) I am willing to bet real money that there will be zero drugs discovered by AlphaFold that meet the following criteria: 1) The drug couldn't have been discovered without AlphaFold 2) It has been proven to reduce all cause mortality (the thing real patients actually care about) in a randomized controlled clinical trial BETTER than the prior standard of care (or significantly more cheaply, or with significantly reduced side effects)
- hugopenmir 3y ago
  Send them your resume or ideas about how to do it faster and better, it could help !
  - TaupeRanger 3y ago
    There is no way to do it faster or better with these techniques. It is a waste of money - that's the entire point. My advice would be: stop wasting time, money, and human brainpower. Go off and try entirely new approaches to AI that might actually work!
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      This is such a bizarre take. AlphaFold is faster and better - but it still takes years to develop anything in the life sciences. It's like pointing to special relativity in 1905 and saying it'll never be useful for anything.
hugopenmir 3y ago
Exactly !

TaupeRanger 3y ago

And yet, even after 5 years there's no sign of any real, meaningful drugs, even just Phase I trials. In 5 - 10 years (which will be 10 to 15 years after AlphaFold was released) I am willing to bet real money that there will be zero drugs discovered by AlphaFold that meet the following criteria: 1) The drug couldn't have been discovered without AlphaFold 2) It has been proven to reduce all cause mortality (the thing real patients actually care about) in a randomized controlled clinical trial BETTER than the prior standard of care (or significantly more cheaply, or with significantly reduced side effects)

hugopenmir 3y ago
Send them your resume or ideas about how to do it faster and better, it could help !
- TaupeRanger 3y ago
  There is no way to do it faster or better with these techniques. It is a waste of money - that's the entire point. My advice would be: stop wasting time, money, and human brainpower. Go off and try entirely new approaches to AI that might actually work!
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    This is such a bizarre take. AlphaFold is faster and better - but it still takes years to develop anything in the life sciences. It's like pointing to special relativity in 1905 and saying it'll never be useful for anything.

hugopenmir 3y ago

Exactly !