DeepMind is using AI to pinpoint the causes of genetic disease

Google DeepMind says it’s trained an artificial intelligence that can predict which DNA variations in our genomes are likely to cause disease—predictions that could speed diagnosis of rare disorders and possibly yield clues for drug development.

DeepMind, founded in London and acquired by Google 10 years ago, is known for artificial-intelligence programs that play video games and have conquered complex board games like Go. It jumped into medicine when it announced that its program AlphaFold was able to accurately predict the shape of proteins, a problem considered a “grand challenge” in biology.

Now the company says it has fine-tuned that protein model to predict which misspellings found in human DNA are safe to ignore and which are likely to cause disease. The new software, called AlphaMissense, was described today in a report published by the journal Science. 

Read the full article in MIT Technology Review.