Reacción a "AlphaGenome, an AI tool from Google, predicts the impact of variations in DNA"

AlphaGenome is a great example of how AI is accelerating biological discovery and the development of therapeutics. Identifying the precise differences in our genomes that make us more or less likely to develop thousands of diseases is a key step towards developing better therapeutics. AlphaGenome and models like it that help decipher the regulatory code of our genome will make it much easier to do this.

As we have come to expect from Google Deepmind, AlphaGenome is a great piece of engineering that brings together ideas developed by many different scientists into a model that sets the standards. At the Wellcome Sanger Institute we have tested AlphaGenome using over half a million new experiments and it does indeed perform very well. 

However, AlphaGenome is far from perfect and there is still a lot of work to do. AI models are only as good as the data used to train them. Most existing data in biology is not very suitable for AI - the datasets are too small and not well standardized. The most important challenge right now is how to generate the data to train the next generation of even more powerful AI models. We need to do this fast, cost effectively and in a way that both the data and the resulting models are available for everyone to use.