Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has launched Isomorphic Labs, a new drug discovery company which will build on research carried out by its artificial intelligence lab DeepMind.
Isomorphic Labs was officially announced only recently, it was incorporated in February in London.
Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, is also the founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs and said the mission of his company was to “reimagining the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach”.
In a blog post, Hassabis wrote: “I believe we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of biological and medical research. Last year DeepMind’s breakthrough AI system AlphaFold2 was recognised as a solution to the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein folding, capable of predicting the 3D structure of a protein directly from its amino acid sequence to atomic-level accuracy. This has been a watershed moment for computational and AI methods for biology.
“Building on this advance, I’m thrilled to announce the creation of a new Alphabet company – Isomorphic Labs – a commercial venture with the mission to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach and, ultimately, to model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life.”
Identifying new drugs is a long, complex trial-and-error process that involves combining lots of different compounds in different ways. Several experts believe AI can speed up the process.
“The pandemic has brought to the fore the vital work that brilliant scientists and clinicians do every day to understand and combat disease. We believe that the foundational use of cutting edge computational and AI methods can help scientists take their work to the next level, and massively accelerate the drug discovery process,” wrote Hassabis.
“AI methods will increasingly be used not just for analysing data, but to also build powerful predictive and generative models of complex biological phenomena. AlphaFold2 is an important first proof point of this, but there is so much more to come.”
