Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG GOOGL Isomorphic Labs says its first artificial-intelligence-designed medicines are nearly ready for human testing.
What Happened: Isomorphic Labs President Colin Murdoch spoke to Fortune in an interview recently where he said, “There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer right now.”
“The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings,” Murdoch added. “We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close.” Isomorphic, spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021, grew from AlphaFold, the program that predicts protein shapes with near-lab accuracy.
Murdoch said AlphaFold’s latest version can simulate how candidate compounds bind to DNA and proteins, letting chemists iterate faster and more precisely. In 2024, Isomorphic struck research pacts with Novartis NVS and Eli Lilly LLY and, in April this year, raised $600 million led by Thrive Capital to build what Murdoch calls a “world-class drug design engine.”
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“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,” he said.
Why It Matters: Rivals are rushing to the clinic as well. Recursion Pharmaceuticals RXRX expects seven programs to begin or read out human studies next year. On the other hand, Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine earlier this year announced positive takeaways from trials of its AI-designed drug meant for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Investor interest is surging. Recursion shares jumped 18% last month after unveiling an open-source binding-prediction model developed with MIT. Chipmakers are piling in, too. AMD AMD just invested $20 million in Absci to challenge Nvidia’s NVDA BioNeMo platform in AI drug discovery.
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