Disclaimer: I did not work in protein design but in biophysics. However some of my collaborators did.

It definitely is a small help. Although the lab I was working with had supercalculators to generate microtubule-binding proteins, They were kind of limited in how many they could simulate and try, so being able to go through 318K molecules is useful. Our lab was then tasked with doing the testing (I designed the automated assay) and this part is going on right now, I expect it to last around a year (small lab, many tests to run).

Once potential medical targets have been found, the actual work takes several years as you have mentionned as you would switch to cell cultures, then animal models, then human trials. That matches the 6-7 years timeline you mentionned.

So overall, you can crunch a ~6-months period into 1 month, which is definitely a time saver.

As a former drug discovery scientist I agree with the “small help” conclusion.

Find “potential leads” is something we did plenty of with computational chemistry. We’d get leads that we a “slam dunk” and they’d fail horribly in clinical trials.

Finding leads is easy, finding leads that reliably pan out in the lab is not