Artificial intelligence (AI) has numerous applications in healthcare, from analyzing medical imaging to optimizing the execution of clinical trials, and even facilitating drug discovery.
AlphaFold2, an artificial intelligence system that predicts protein structures, has made it possible for scientists to identify and conjure an almost infinite number of drug candidates for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. However recent studies have sown doubt about the accuracy of AlphaFold2 in modeling ligand binding sites, the areas on proteins where drugs attach and begin signaling inside cells to cause a therapeutic effect, as well as possible side effects.
In a new paper, Bryan Roth, MD, PhD, the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and director of the NIMH Psychoactive Drug Screening Program at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and colleagues at UCSF, Stanford, and Harvard determined that AlphaFold2 can yield accurate results for ligand binding structures, even when the technology has nothing to go off of. Their results were published in Science.
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