Why is protein folding important? Theoretical importance? Can we do something with protein folding knowledge? If so, what?
I've been hearing about AlphaFold from the CS side. There they seem to focus on protein folding primarily as an interesting space to apply their CS efforts.
Researchers can come up with candidate molecule formulas that might work as good drugs, but the problem is that these proteins organize/fold themselves physically in a hard-to-predict way. And how they fold directly affects their properties as drugs.
If AlphaFold can accurately predict folding, it’ll allow researchers to prioritize drug candidates more accurately which will reduce research time and costs. Supposedly the major pharmaceutical companies can spend up to billions when designing a single drug. Optimistically, predicting protein folding better will allow for much more rapid and cheaper drug development
Yes, once you identified a target protein, its structure is useful to selectively target it. But the main bottleneck is identifying such targets. In other words, the main difficulty is to figure out what to hit, not how to hit it, and protein folding mostly helps with how at the moment.