Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched a new company, Isomorphic Labs, a commercial venture with the mission to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles with an AI-first approach.
Isomorphic Labs is an artificial intelligence company built on the protein-folding simulation successes achieved at DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of Alphabet that was acquired by Google in 2014.
Isomorphic Labs plans to use AI software to create new drugs and medicines. Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, is also the founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs and will remain CEO of D both the companies. Hassabis is also a UK Government AI Advisor since 2018.
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Headquartered in London, Isomorphic Labs is a separate entity from DeepMind and has its own dedicated resources.
Interestingly, Isomorphic Labs will eventually pick up a new CEO as the company moves into later stages. The newly formed company is looking to hire computational and medicinal chemists as well as machine learning experts in addition to filling scientific, engineering and operational roles.
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. AlphaFold is touted as the most important dataset since the mapping of the Human Genome.
