Many diseases such as sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and alzheimer's disease can result from incorrect protein folding. Understanding the protein folding process, and the structures that result from it is essential to learning how to develop treatments for these conditions. However knowledge of the structure of the majority of proteins severely hampered by the fact that the technique most frequently used to determine structure, X-Ray Crystallography, is too expensive and time-consuming to keep up with the new DNA-sequencing techniques now being employed by bioligists.

The protein folding problem is among the most significant unsolved problems in biology today, and is essentially the effort to accurately computationally predict the unique three dimensional structure that results from a particular sequence of amino acids.