Latest news with #IsomorphicLabs
Hindustan Times
10 hours ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Google prepares to test AI designed drugs on people for first time
Google DeepMind's somewhat secretive spinoff, Isomorphic Labs, appears to be moving closer to a significant milestone in the world of drug development. How, you wonder? The company, which launched in 2021 after DeepMind's AlphaFold breakthrough, is preparing for its first human trials of drugs designed with artificial intelligence. Their aim? To speed up the process of drug discovery, cut costs, and improve the odds of success in getting new medicines to patients. How does it work? AlphaFold, the technology at the heart of Isomorphic Labs, made a name for itself by predicting the 3D structure of proteins. This ability has given scientists a clearer view of how proteins interact with other molecules which is essential for designing new drugs. Isomorphic Labs has taken this foundation and built a team that combines AI researchers with pharmaceutical experts. The company's work is focused on diseases like cancer and immunology, areas where new treatments are badly needed. In addition, the company has secured partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms, including Novartis and Eli Lilly. These collaborations are designed to support both existing drug programmes and the development of new, in-house drug candidates. According to president Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs is now close to moving its AI-designed drugs into human clinical trials, as reported by Fortune. Teams in London are now seeing several candidates who've been put through preclinical testing and the next step is to test these drugs in people. The Isomorphic story In April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in a funding round led by Thrive Capital. This funding is being used to expand the company's AI infrastructure and support clinical development. Their goal? To create a drug design system that can identify unmet medical needs, design drug candidates, and move them into clinical trials faster and with a greater chance of success than traditional methods - all using AI! Drug development is known for being expensive and slow, with a low success rate once trials begin. Isomorphic Labs believes its approach can improve efficiency and raise the odds that a drug will work before it even reaches human testing because of AI. The company is also working on its own internal drug design programmes, with the intention of licensing out successful candidates after early-stage trials. Human trials have not yet started, but the company is preparing for this next phase. The outcome of these trials will provide the first real data on whether AI-designed drugs can perform as expected in people, which will be exciting to see. First Published Date: 09 Jul, 18:42 IST
Gizmodo
a day ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
An AI That Promises to 'Solve All Diseases' Is About to Test Its First Human Drugs
Deep inside Alphabet, the parent company of Google, a secretive lab is working on a promise so audacious it sounds like science fiction: to 'solve all diseases.' The company, Isomorphic Labs, is now preparing to start its first human clinical trials for cancer drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence. In a recent interview with Fortune, Colin Murdoch, President of Isomorphic Labs and Chief Business Officer of Google DeepMind, confirmed the company is on the verge of this monumental step. For anyone who has watched a loved one battle a devastating illness, the hope this offers is immense. But for a public increasingly wary of AI's power, it raises a chilling question: can we really trust a 'black box' algorithm with our lives? Isomorphic Labs was born from DeepMind's celebrated AlphaFold breakthrough, the AI system that stunned scientists by predicting the complex 3D shapes of proteins. To understand why this is a big deal, you need to know how drugs are traditionally made. For decades, it's been a slow, brutal process of trial and error. Scientists spend an average of 10 to 15 years and over a billion dollars to bring a single new drug to market, with most candidates failing along the way. Isomorphic Labs uses its AI, AlphaFold 3, to radically accelerate this. The AI can predict the complex 3D structures of proteins in the human body with stunning accuracy, allowing scientists to digitally design new drug molecules that are perfectly shaped to fight a specific disease, all before ever entering a physical lab The company has already signed multi-billion dollar deals with pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Eli Lilly, and just raised $600 million in new funding to move its own drug candidates—starting with oncology—into human trials. The promise is a medical utopia. 'This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programs into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI,' CEO Sir Demi Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for his pioneering work on AlphaFold 2, said back in March. But when Big Tech starts designing medicine, who owns your cure? This is where deep-seated fears about AI's role in our lives come into focus. The biggest concern is the 'black box' problem: we know the AI gives an answer, but we don't always know how. This raises critical questions: When contacted by Gizmodo, a spokesperson for Isomorphic Labs said the company 'don't have anything more to share.' AI could revolutionize medicine. But if left unchecked, it could also replicate the worst parts of the tech industry: opacity, monopoly, and profit over access. Isomorphic Labs is pushing humanity toward a monumental turning point. If they succeed, they could alleviate more suffering than any other invention in history. But to do so, they first have to convince a skeptical public that the promise is worth the unprecedented risk.
Indian Express
2 days ago
- Business
- Indian Express
Alphabet-owned company to begin human trials for cancer drug developed using AI
Pharmaceutical firm Isomorphic Labs is set to initiate human clinical trials for its oncology drugs created using AlphaFold 3, an AI tool developed by the company in collaboration with Google DeepMind. Founded in 2021, Isomorphic Labs is a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet. It is currently preparing to dose the first patients with the AI-engineered drug in clinical trials and is 'staffing up' ahead of the trials, Isomorphic Labs president Colin Murdoch said in a recent interview with Fortune. AlphaFold 3 is an AI tool that has been designed to help clinicians predict complex protein structures and molecular interactions. Using the tool, Isomorphic Labs were able to take major strides in terms of development of the drug. Oncology drugs are essential medications as they play a vital role in the treatment of cancer. The drug either kills the cancer cells or slows their growth, allowing for further treatment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were around 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths recorded in 2022. However, AI tools such as AlphaFold 3 are said to have vast potential in helping discover new types of drugs for treating terminal illnesses like cancer. In March last year, Isomorphic Labs was able to raise over 600 million dollars through a funding round led by Thrive Capital. The company confirmed the use of this funding for the development of the AI drug-design engine, and helping toward their push to clinical trials. 'This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programmes into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI,' Demis Hassabis, the CEO of both Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind, said. The company has inked partnerships worth over three billion dollars with pharma giants such as Novartis and Eli Lilly. The company's goal is to build a 'world-class drug design engine' that merges AI and human expertise to engineer new medications with a higher success rate at a cheaper cost for both manufacturers and consumers. With the rapid rise of AI, other biotech companies such as Anima Biotech, Iktos, and Novo Nordisk are also harnessing the technology for more effective operations. Notably, Novo Nordisk signed a deal worth 2.76 billion dollars with Valo Health, aiming to make use of AI in their drug discovery process. As per GlobalData statistics, over 3,000 drugs exist that have either been developed or re-purposed using AI technologies. While most of them are in the early stages of their development, they are still to be clinically tested on humans. With its upcoming human tests, Isomorphic Labs could potentially pave the way for further progress in the biotech application of AI.
Fast Company
2 days ago
- Health
- Fast Company
Google's AI drug company says human trials are ‘very close'
Isomorphic Labs, the AI -powered drug company spun out of Google's DeepMind, just announced that it's 'getting ready' to begin human clinical trials of drugs designed by AI. In an interview with Fortune on July 6, Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs' president and Google DeepMind's chief business officer, shared that the company is currently gearing up to start human trials. This milestone will mark the first time that Google DeepMind's breakthrough AI drug discovery system, AlphaFold3, will be put into practice on actual patients. The news comes as tech companies and research institutions are rolling out new applications for AI in medicine at a frantic pace. Early this month, Microsoft released a report claiming that its new AI Diagnostic Orchestrator is around four times more accurate than a human physician when it comes to diagnosing complex issues. On the same day, researchers at Northwestern Medicine published a study on a new AI-powered device that may revolutionize cancer screening. Now, here's what to know about Isomorphic Labs' next major step in AI-powered drug development: What is Isomorphic Labs? Isomorphic Labs is a London-based drug developer that's owned and operated by Alphabet Inc. The company was founded in 2021 as an offshoot from DeepMind, Google's multidisciplinary AI research arm. In multiple interviews, Isomorphic Labs executives have explained the company's intimidating goal: to eventually 'solve all diseases' using AI. 'This isn't about developing therapeutics for a particular indication or a particular target,' Max Jaderberg, chief AI officer at Isomorphic Labs, explained in an interview this April. 'It's really thinking about, how do we create a really general drug design engine with AI—something that we can apply to not just a single target, or even a single modality, but we can apply this again and again across any different disease area?' What is AlphaFold AI? The key unlock driving Isomorphic Labs' expansive goal is its trailblazing AlphaFold AI system, a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry last October. The most recent iteration of the technology, AlphaFold3, can predict proteins' complex structures, as well as modeling how certain proteins might interact with other molecules, like DNA and drugs. These insights can essentially give researchers a supercharged headstart on drug development. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis explained the tech in a conference call last May: 'You imagine that AlphaFold gives you the structure of a protein you're interested in, in a particular disease, lets say, and with these new capabilities we can now design a compound or ligand (a ' chemical messenger ') that will bind to a specific place . . . on the surface of the protein, once you understand the structure of it, and we can predict how strong the binding affinity will be,' Hassabis said. 'It's a critical step if you want to design drugs.' Currently, AlphaFold serves as an AI-powered first step in drug development. After the AlphaFold3 system models a potential interaction, researchers then need to use other AI models to predict factors like toxicity and interactions with other drugs. Then, to actually commercialize a new drug, it needs to be tested in wet lab experiments, followed by human clinical trials. What's happening now? Now, that human clinical trial step is finally in sight. According to Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs' team is currently 'collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,' and is already 'staffing up' for its first human clinical trials. 'One day we hope to be able to say—well, here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease, all powered by these amazing AI tools,' Murdoch told Fortune.
NDTV
2 days ago
- Business
- NDTV
Google Ready To Start Human Trials Of Its AI-Designed Drugs
Google DeepMind's drug discovery company, Isomorphic Labs, is set to launch human trials of its AI-designed drugs. The company is aiming to use cutting-edge AI to design medicines faster, cheaper and more accurately. Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs president and Google DeepMind's chief business officer, confirmed to Fortune that the human trials were set to get underway. "There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. That's happening right now," said Mr Murdoch. "The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings. We're staffing up now. We're getting very close." Isomorphic Labs was born in the wake of DeepMind's revolutionary AlphaFold AI system that predicts protein structures with high level of accuracy. AlphaFold's creators, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both from DeepMind, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker from the University of Washington. "This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Lab. It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery," said Mr Murdoch. Isomorphic Labs Since the beginning of Isomorphic Labs in 2021, it has partnered with major pharmaceutical companies like Novartis and Eli Lilly. The company secured $600 million in funding in April 2025 to accelerate the mission. Alongside supporting existing drug programmes, the company is researching and developing new drugs in fields like oncology and immunology. Currently, pharma companies spend millions and years on a single drug development. With only a 10 per cent success rate in trials, Isomorphic Labs is aiming to use AI to boost the odds and reduce the resources required for the entire process. "We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programs. We develop those, put them into human clinical haven't got that yet, but we're making good progress," said Mr Murdoch. "We're trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful. One day we hope to be able to say, well, here's a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease. All powered by these amazing AI tools," he added.
