Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work

“We haven’t designed or validated AlphaGenome for personal genome prediction, a known challenge for AI models,” Google said in a statement.

Underlying the AI system is the so-called transformer architecture invented at Google that also powers large language models like GPT-4. This one was trained on troves of experimental data produced by public scientific projects.

Lareau says the system will not broadly change how his lab works day to day but could permit new types of research. For instance, sometimes doctors encounter patients with ultra-rare cancers, bristling with unfamiliar mutations. AlphaGenome could suggest which of those mutations are really causing the root problem, possibly pointing to a treatment.

“A hallmark of cancer is that specific mutations in DNA make the wrong genes express in the wrong context,” says Julien Gagneur, a professor of computational medicine at the Technical University of Munich. “This type of tool is instrumental in narrowing down which ones mess up proper gene expression.”

The same approach could apply to patients with rare genetic disease, many of whom never learn the source of their condition, even if their DNA has been decoded. “We can obtain their genomes, but we are clueless as to which genetic alterations cause the disease,” says Gagneur. He thinks AlphaGenome could give medical scientists a new way to diagnose such cases.

Eventually, some researchers aspire to use AI to design entire genomes from the ground up and create new life forms. Others think the models will be used to create a fully virtual laboratory for drug studies. “My dream would be to simulate a virtual cell,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said this year.

Kohli calls AlphaGenome a “milestone” on the road to that kind of system. “AlphaGenome may not model the whole cell in its entirety … but it’s starting to sort of shed light on the broader semantics of DNA,” he says.