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 foundational biology at scale,” said Risha Patel, life sciences partnerships manager at Google DeepMind. “This collaboration to bring thousands of viral complexes into the database will equip scientists around the world with insights they need to help prepare for future outbreaks.”

NVIDIA is also openly releasing the BioNeMo Structure Prediction Pipeline, the GPU-accelerated workflow used to generate the dataset, so researchers can go from protein sequence to predicted 3D structure for their own targets.

Preparation for the next pandemic must begin now. An analysis by the Center for Global Development estimates a roughly 50% chance of the world facing a pandemic as severe as COVID-19 by 2050.

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