Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. has launched Isomorphic Labs, a new artificial intelligence company that will specialise in the discovery of new drugs.
Medical research. Credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock
Credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock
Registered in the UK, the new company will leverage technology developed by its sister company DeepMind "to accelerate drug discovery, and ultimately, find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases," DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis said in a blog post. He also said that he will become the CEO of Isomorphic Labs.
The scientific world was rocked earlier this year when DeepMind revealed how its AlphaFold2 technology can be used to predict the shape of each and every protein in the human body with near total accuracy.
Read more: Bristol-Myers & Exscientia partner for AI-driven drug discovery
The model developed by DeepMind can find a solution to one of the most difficult problems in biology by examining an amino acid sequence and mapping the nuances of its shape. The algorithm may enhance or even ultimately replace the need for meticulous laboratory work to identify the structure of proteins, which dictate their behaviour.
Academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies are keen to use the tool, which DeepMind has made available on an open-source basis - to discover new targets for drugs. Its speed will drastically reduce the time taken to discover innovative new treatments, though the full clinical trial process is still likely to take years.
DeepMind says it will attempt to use AlphaFold2 to find treatments for Leishmaniasis and Chagas disease, two of the world's deadliest diseases.
Isomorphic will form partnerships with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and is currently hiring engineers, scientists and machine learning experts.
Read more: Glaxo's two potential breakthroughs in HIV treatment
"At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily complex and dynamic one," added Hassabis.
"Taking this perspective implies there may be a common underlying structure between biology and information science — an isomorphic mapping between the two — hence the name of the company."
He added that he hopes the company will use AI beyond AlphaFold2 to predict complex biological phenomena.
AlphaBase2 and its database, which by now has been trained on several hundreds of thousands of known structures, will remain open-source for external use.
Back to Homepage
Back to Healthcare
Back to Technology & Innovation