LONDON, May 8 (Reuters) - Google Deepmind has

unveiled the third major version of its "AlphaFold" artificial

intelligence model, designed to help scientists design drugs and

target disease more effectively.

In 2020, the company made a significant advance in molecular

biology by using AI to successfully predict the behaviour of

microscopic proteins.

With the latest incarnation of AlphaFold, researchers at

DeepMind and sister company Isomorphic Labs - both overseen by

cofounder Demis Hassabis - have mapped the behaviour for all of

life's molecules, including human DNA.

The interactions of proteins - from enzymes crucial to the

human metabolism, to the antibodies that fight infectious

diseases - with other molecules is key to drug discovery and

development.

DeepMind said the findings, published in research journal

Nature on Wednesday, would reduce the time and money needed to

develop potentially life-changing treatments.

"With these new capabilities, we can design a molecule that

will bind to a specific place on a protein, and we can predict

how strongly it will bind," Hassabis said in a press briefing on

Tuesday.

"It's a critical step if you want to design drugs and

compounds that will help with disease."

The company also announced the release of the "AlphaFold

server", a free online tool that scientists can use to test

their hypotheses before running real-world tests.

Since 2021, AlphaFold's predictions have been freely

accessible to non-commercial researchers, as part of a database

containing more than 200 million protein structures, and has

been cited thousands of times in others' work.

DeepMind said the new server required less computing

knowledge, allowing researchers to run tests with just a few

clicks of a button.

John Jumper, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, said:

"It's going to be really important how much easier the AlphaFold

server makes it for biologists - who are experts in biology, not

computer science - to test larger, more complex cases."

Dr Nicole Wheeler, an expert in microbiology at the

University of Birmingham, said AlphaFold 3 could significantly

speed up the drug discovery pipeline, as "physically producing

and testing biological designs is a big bottleneck in

biotechnology at the moment".