Dreaming up new proteins, AI churns out possible medicines and vaccines

Computational biologist Jue Wang was already striving to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) to churn out candidate medicines when he had to rush his 2-year-old son to the hospital with a potentially lethal respiratory infection. After seeing his son quickly recover from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), Wang, a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, and his colleagues redoubled their efforts and yesterday they unveiled in Science a new AI software that can “paint” or “hallucinate” structures for proteins that don’t yet exist in nature. The software has already created original compounds for potential use in industrial reactions, cancer treatment, and even a vaccine candidate aimed at preventing RSV infections. “It’s the perfect use of AI,” says Yang Zhang, a protein designer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the work. Though researchers have used computers and other means to design novel proteins for...