AlphaFold: Five Years of Impact

Increasing speed of discovery

Cyril Zipfel, professor of Molecular & Cellular Plant Physiology at the University of Zurich and Sainsbury Lab, saw research timelines shrink drastically. They used AlphaFold alongside comparative genomics to better understand how plants perceive changes in their environment, paving the way for more resilient crops.

AlphaFold has been cited in more than 35,000 papers and more than 200,000 papers incorporated elements of AlphaFold 2 in their methodology. It’s also enhancing the quality of work being produced.

An independent analysis of AlphaFold 2’s impact, carried out by the Innovation Growth Lab, suggests that researchers using AlphaFold 2 see an increase of over 40% in their submission of novel experimental protein structures. Those protein structures are more likely to be dissimilar to known structures, encouraging the exploration of uncharted areas of science. Also, research linked to AlphaFold 2 is twice as likely to be cited in clinical articles, and is significantly more likely to be cited by a patent, than typical works in structural biology.

A new era of digital biology

One of the most exciting examples of AlphaFold’s impact is Isomorphic Labs – an AI drug discovery company founded in 2021 when the breakthrough model proved to be powerful enough to be applied to rational drug design. Isomorphic Labs has since developed a unified drug design engine to dramatically change how it designs new medicines and speed up scientific discovery with an ambition to one day solve all diseases.

Together with Isomorphic Labs, we developed AlphaFold 3, which offers an unprecedented view into cells that we expect to drive a transformation of the drug discovery process and usher in an era of “digital biology.”

The model is designed to predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules — not just proteins, but DNA, RNA, and ligands (the small molecules that make up most drugs). It can also generate the joint 3D structures of entire molecular complexes, allowing a holistic view of how a potential drug molecule binds to its target protein, or how proteins interact with genetic material.

The AlphaFold Server is empowering non-commercial researchers globally to harness this technology, accelerating their ability to formulate and test new hypotheses. So far, it’s helped make more than 8 million folds – predictions of structures and interactions – for thousands of researchers around the world.