Building a new path to make medicines with AI - Isomorphic Labs

Summary

Listen: Solving all disease is one of the most monumentally complex challenges in science. Today, for the first time, AI provides the foundation to make it achievable. Tackling the frontier of human health is our mission, and it means identifying exactly where modern AI can make the greatest difference. We see drug discovery as the critical wedge in solving all disease, and therefore our initial focal point where AI can have a transformative impact on human health. Developing a drug that successfully and effectively treats disease fundamentally involves understanding biological mechanisms and designing exquisitely engineered molecules that can modulate them safely. So we are taking a straight shot at making that a reality. We are generating the data, training the AI models, developing the software, and laying down the physical infrastructure to make new medicines; taking these potential therapeutics all the way to patients in the clinic. We are building this new architecture in a way that will scale across multiple disease areas, and different types of medicines, from small molecules to antibodies, peptides, and beyond. In 2021, when we started Isomorphic Labs, AI drug discovery was just a hypothesis. Conventional approaches were bottlenecked by slow, resource-intensive iterative design-make-test cycles, viewing AI as an experimental tool for narrow tasks. At the same time the AI revolution was well underway across multiple industries. A seismic shift was happening with the emergence of foundation models, moving away from single-task algorithms toward highly versatile systems capable of world-understanding, zero-shot reasoning and generating complex text and images. Up to this point, I had spent my education and career in core AI, building intelligent systems by scaling up neural networks and deep reinforcement learning to solve the hardest problems at a superhuman level. But having grown up in a medical family, I recognised the potential to apply this superhuman new technology to humanity’s most meaningful challenge: human health. Working with Sir Demis Hassabis, we created the founding team at Isomorphic Labs to pivot breakthroughs in AI toward solving the drug discovery problem. We set out on a path to approach drug discovery as an engineering process, stripping back to first principles, to rebuild the process to design medicines. Almost every field of e…