Demis Hassabis, CEO of Isomorphic and Google DeepMind
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Founded as an Alphabet entity in 2021, Isomorphic holds substantial funds but remains reserved about its potential clinical drugs.
On Tuesday, Isomorphic Labs, a venture established by Alphabet to leverage AI for drug development, announced the acquisition of $2.1 billion from investors led by Thrive Capital. This significant funding makes it the second-largest ever in biotech, trailing only Altos Labs, as noted by Endpoints News. The investment highlights the market’s optimism regarding AI’s potential to streamline the expensive and protracted drug development process.
“We’re aiming to redefine the way we create new medicines,” shared Max Jaderberg, Isomorphic’s President, with Forbes. He emphasized that the funding is “a lot of validation of what we’ve been building out the past four-and-a-half, almost five, years.” This investment, with its valuation undisclosed, comes after the company’s initial external funding of $600 million the previous year.
Based in London, Isomorphic is primarily recognized for its AI model, AlphaFold, which predicts protein structures. CEO Demis Hassabis, who also leads Google DeepMind, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this innovation. The latest version, AlphaFold 3, released in May 2024, is capable of working with diverse drug components, including small molecules, peptides, antibodies, and proteins. Building on this, the company has developed the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine, or IsoDDE. Jaderberg describes IsoDDE as akin to multiple AlphaFold breakthroughs, with capabilities to assess therapy-target binding and potential toxic side effects.
Jaderberg notes that the Iso drug design engine is versatile and not restricted to any specific disease area, reflecting their mission to tackle all diseases. Having joined Google in 2014, Jaderberg previously served as Isomorphic’s chief AI officer.
The main question, however, is how Isomorphic plans to utilize this technology, a topic on which Jaderberg remains reserved.
The company has secured partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms, Novartis and Eli Lilly, potentially worth up to $3 billion collectively. Additionally, Isomorphic is venturing into in-house therapeutic design, a notable shift for a tech-centric company.
Jaderberg indicates that Isomorphic is broadening its therapy pipeline, driven by successes with the drug design engine, focusing on oncology, immunology, and inflammation. “The programs we are going after are not fast-follower programs,” he explains, aiming to address significant challenges where existing treatments have been inadequate or could improve the standard of care.
While Isomorphic aims to advance these drug candidates to clinical trials, Jaderberg refrains from detailing the lead therapies or specifying a timeline. Hassabis had previously mentioned a timeline extending to the end of 2026 at the World Economic Forum, marking a delay of one year.
The future of Isomorphic’s assets remains undecided—whether they will be sold, licensed to pharmaceutical companies, or marketed directly by Isomorphic as a traditional drug company. Jaderberg suggests that each drug could be treated as “an individual business,” implying varied approaches for different therapies.
The AI drug discovery field has evolved significantly since Recursion’s inception in 2013, with numerous new developers emerging. Among them are Chai Discovery, valued at $1.3 billion with a Lilly partnership, and Manifold Bio, which has raised $40 million and partnered with Roche.
“It’s so exciting to see how this AI for drug discovery space has blossomed since we started,” Jaderberg expresses. “When we started the company, changing the way we do drug design with AI was a hypothesis. … It’s moved from a hypothesis to this is real and we know this works.”
The next step for Isomorphic is to demonstrate that an AI-designed drug can reach patients.
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