NVIDIA, DeepMind open AlphaFold-predicted structures for 2,800+ viral protein complexes
NVIDIA Blog · rss · 2026-09-24
NVIDIA has joined a coalition including Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI to openly release predicted 3D structures for protein complexes of more than 2,800 viruses via the AlphaFold Database, aiming to stockpile knowledge ahead of the next pandemic.
- Structures were inferred with AlphaFold2, optimized via NVIDIA BioNeMo Inference Runtime to scale across thousands of viral proteomes; roughly 30% of the protein interactions are entirely new to science.
- Traditional X-ray crystallography takes years and thousands of dollars per structure; AlphaFold2 predicts in minutes, letting the team systematically cover viral families known to infect humans, from common-cold viruses to Mpox.
- NVIDIA is also open-sourcing the GPU-accelerated BioNeMo Structure Prediction Pipeline used to generate the dataset, so researchers can predict structures for their own targets.
- The AlphaFold Database now holds 260M+ protein and complex predictions. Citing an estimate of a 50% chance of a COVID-scale pandemic by 2050, collaborators frame the dataset as an engine for hypothesis generation in vaccine and drug design.
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