Will we soon be taking AI-designed medicines? According to Isomorphic Labs, yes.
After years of development, Isomorphic Labs, a spin-off of DeepMind, is on the verge of reaching a new milestone: clinical trials with AI-designed drugs. This was confirmed by Colin Murdoch, Chairman of Isomorphic Labs and Chief Business Officer at Google DeepMind, in an interview with Fortune.
From Protein Predictions to Drug Design
Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 based on DeepMind’s AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures with high accuracy. Since then, the system can now replicate interactions between proteins and molecules such as DNA and drugs. This makes it possible to use AI not only as a research tool, but also as a design tool for medicines.
Murdoch calls this the inspiration for Isomorphic: “It shows that with fundamental AI innovation, we can rethink the drug development process.” The team in London is now working with AI to design cancer medication, among other things.
Ready for the Next Step
After an external investment round of 600 million dollars in early 2025, Isomorphic is ready to take the step towards human trials. Murdoch: “We are scaling up. The next major milestone is effectively administering our designs to humans.”
Isomorphic is currently working on its own portfolio of drugs in oncology and immunology. The company intends to license these programs to larger players after successful trials.
Rethinking Drug Development with AI
The intention is to build a design platform that links AI researchers with pharmaceutical expertise. This should not only be faster and cheaper, but also increase the success rate of new drugs. Where traditional methods achieve barely ten percent success in clinical phases, Murdoch aims to drastically increase that chance with AI.