Professor Tim Hubbard: Making the impossible possible

"Humans are fantastically complicated, with 37 trillion cells and we don’t even know how many different cell types there are. But’s there’s a place to build from now. Having AlphaFold is like having a Rosetta Stone to translate; you couldn’t read the language of proteins - sequence defining structure and function - before." 

Tim Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics, Head of the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King's College London, and also a Senior Advisor to Genomics England. And no wonder, with so many achievements under his belt; Tim has had a vital role in the Human Genome Project - where the first human genome was mapped and annotated in Ensembl and Gencode - as well as in co-organising Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competitions for several years.

In this episode, Tim tells Chris about how he first got hooked on bioinformatics before it was formalised as a field, and how the breakthrough with AlphaFold means a better understanding between genomics and healthcare.

Find out more about AlphaFold, the AI system that has made a huge scientific breakthrough and solved a 50-year grand challenge.