🔬ESMFold2: The Bitter Lesson is Coming for Proteins - Alex Rives, BioHub
BioHub has released ESMFold 2, an open scientific engine for protein biology, leveraging transformer models trained on vast protein sequence data. This new model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in predicting protein interactions, particularly for antibodies, and shows promise in cancer and immunology research. ESMFold 2's approach, which relies on scaling laws and unsupervised learning rather than traditional multi-sequence alignments used by models like AlphaFold, suggests a potential shift in protein structure prediction methodologies. AI
IMPACT Challenges existing protein folding models like AlphaFold, potentially accelerating drug discovery and therapeutic development through scaled transformer architectures.