AlphaFold for Drug Discovery

Google DeepMind's AlphaFold protein structure database — expanded to 200 million proteins in 2023 and updated to predict molecular interactions in 2024 — became the foundational tool for pharmaceutical drug discovery. Pfizer, Novartis, AstraZeneca, and 190 other pharma companies integrated AlphaFold predictions into their pipeline, with researchers crediting it for identifying 20+ novel drug targets that would have taken years to find via traditional crystallography.