Comment by ray__

I love AlphaFold, but this is a big misconception. The biggest cost bottle neck in drug development and design, by orders of magnitude, is associated with assaying (and potentially reducing) off-target binding or toxicity and assaying (and potentially increasing) efficacy. Determining a protein structure empirically with cryoEM, NMR, or crystallography will generally cost less than $1M (sometimes far less), which is tiny compared to the many millions or billions of dollars that get poured into clinical trials for a single drug. AF2 is useful in some basic research cases but isn't really that useful for traditional drug design and development.

A machine learning approach for predicting toxicity would have a far greater impact on public health than AF2 does.