AI can suggest Covid-19 antivirals from protein sequence alone

Molecular view of a key component of the SarsCov2 Virus

Source: © Diamond Light Source

IBM model can also find molecules that bind at different sites on target proteins

An artificial intelligence (AI) model has identified potential antiviral molecules that inhibit the Sars-CoV-2 virus, from only the sequence information of target proteins – without any knowledge of the proteins’ 3D structure or known binding sites.