Isomorphic Labs: Alphabet's New AI Drug Discovery Company
Alphabet has founded a new company, Isomorphic Labs, which is rethinking the entire drug discovery process from first principles, with an approach centered on artificial intelligence. The ultimate goal is to model and understand some of the fundamental mechanisms of life.
“I believe we are on the threshold of a new incredible era of biological and medical research. Last year, the revolutionary artificial intelligence system DeepMind AlphaFold2 was recognized as the solution to the great protein folding problem that emerged 50 years ago, capable of predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein directly from its amino acid sequence with atomic-level accuracy. This was a turning point for computational and AI methods in biology”
For more than 10 years, DeepMind has been at the forefront of advancing the latest achievements in artificial intelligence, often using games as a testing ground for developing general-purpose learning systems, such as AlphaGo, a program that defeated world champions in the complex game of Go.
Over the past five years, several large companies have been formed and funded with hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue very similar goals, but no revolution has happened, and no miracle drug discovered by artificial intelligence has emerged for a previously incurable disease. There may be many reasons for this, but one thing is clear: AI systems are not magic factories; they are just parts of a long and complex process.
The world is now at an exciting moment in history, when these methods are becoming powerful and sophisticated enough to be applied to real-world problems, including scientific discovery itself. One of the most important applications of AI that all researchers are thinking about is biological and medical research, an area that many have passionately worked on for many years. Now is the time to advance this with the special focus and resources that Isomorphic Labs will provide.
An AI-based approach to drug discovery
The coronavirus pandemic has brought to the forefront the vital work that outstanding scientists and clinicians do every day to understand and fight diseases. The new company believes that the fundamental use of advanced computational methods and artificial intelligence can help scientists take their work to a new level and significantly accelerate the drug discovery process.
AI methods will be increasingly used not only to analyze data but also to build powerful predictive and generative models of complex biological phenomena. AlphaFold2 is an important first proof of this, but it is not the end of the story.
Hassabis believes that at the most fundamental level, biology can be viewed as an information processing system, although an extremely complex and dynamic one. This approach implies that there may be a common underlying structure between biology and computer science — an isomorphic mapping between them — hence the company's name. Biology is probably too complex and tangled to be represented as a simple set of neat mathematical equations. But just as mathematics turned out to be the right language for describing physics, biology may prove to be an ideal candidate for applying AI.
The future of Isomorphic Labs
Demis Hassabis hopes this is just the beginning of a radically new approach to drug discovery, and he is incredibly excited to launch this ambitious new commercial venture and collaborate with pharmaceutical and biomedical companies. Hassabis will serve as CEO of Isomorphic during its initial stage while remaining CEO of DeepMind, partly to facilitate collaboration between the two companies where necessary, and to define the strategy, vision, and culture of the new company.
This will, of course, include building a world-class interdisciplinary team with deep expertise in areas such as artificial intelligence, biology, medicinal chemistry, biophysics, and engineering, brought together in an innovative, collaborative environment.
“As pioneers in the emerging field of "digital biology," we look forward to helping usher in a new, remarkably productive era of biomedical advances. Isomorphic's mission could not be more important: to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and, ultimately, to find cures for some of humanity's most devastating diseases”
Isomorphic Labs is not the first or only company to say it plans to optimize drug development with AI. Since 2012, a startup from the University of Toronto called Atomwise has had a similar vision. The company has sought to address the sharp rise in drug development costs.
A 2020 study showed that developing a new drug costs an average of $1.3 billion. Much of this is tied to the process itself. Today, researchers physically synthesize every promising compound and then test whether it is safe for human use. As they try to develop treatments for more complex diseases, fewer and fewer drugs make it through human trials.
