How Open Science Can Help Researchers Prepare for the Next Pandemic

When COVID-19 emerged, scientists had a crucial advantage: Decades of prior research on coronaviruses meant they understood the virus’ key proteins well enough to design vaccines in record time. The next pandemic may not offer the same head start.

To help improve the odds, NVIDIA has joined a coalition of global research organizations, including Google DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), to release predicted 3D structures for the protein complexes of more than 2,800 viruses — openly available to any scientist, anywhere, through the AlphaFold Database.

The structures in the newly released dataset were inferred using AlphaFold2 — Google DeepMind’s AI model for predicting how proteins fold into 3D shapes — with optimization from NVIDIA BioNeMo Inference Runtime. This allowed the team to scale inference to thousands of viral proteomes, predicting the complexes, or groups of interacting proteins, encoded within each virus.

“Our ambition with the AlphaFold Database has always been to democratize access to …