A revolution in pharma: AI from DeepMind designs new drugs

Izabela Myszkowska
2 Min Read
Artificial intelligence
Source: Freepik

Isomorphic Labs – a company derived from DeepMind – aims to break this paradigm. Using AlphaFold’s groundbreaking AI technology, the company is now entering the clinical phase with its first AI-designed drugs.

Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 to build a bridge between the capabilities of AI and the pharmaceutical industry. The key technology is AlphaFold, a model that predicts the 3D structures of proteins with remarkable accuracy from 2020. Based on this, the London-based team has created a platform that can model the interactions between proteins, DNA and drug molecules – potentially allowing effective therapies to be designed with far greater precision than traditional approaches.

The company is currently developing its own portfolio of oncology and immunology drugs. Following a $600 million investment round in early 2025, Isomorphic is preparing for its first clinical trials. The ultimate goal is to license finished projects to larger pharmaceutical companies, which will be responsible for further phases of research and commercialisation.

Traditional drug development processes are a multi-year roulette – only around 10% of molecules make it through all phases of clinical trials. Isomorphic is betting that the integration of AI and molecular biology will not only reduce drug development time, but also significantly increase the chances of efficacy.

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This approach is part of the growing trend of using artificial intelligence in pharma. Already, companies such as Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Insilico Medicine and BioNTech are using machine learning algorithms to accelerate molecular analysis. But it is Isomorphic – with the support of Google DeepMind and access to one of the world’s most advanced AI models – that could play a key role in redefining the entire industry.

While success is not guaranteed and the risk of failure remains high, the entry of AI into clinics heralds a new era in drug design – potentially faster, cheaper and more effective.

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