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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year-old drug discovery start-up owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, will have an AI-designed drug in trials by the end of this year, according to its founder Sir Demis Hassabis.
“We’re looking at oncology, cardiovascular system, neurodegeneration, all major disease areas and I think we’ll have our first drug by the end of this year,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times at the World Economic Conference. Forum.
“On average, it takes five to ten years [to discover] one medicine. And maybe we could speed it up 10 times, which would be an incredible revolution in human health,” he said. The Hasabiswho, with colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Baker, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October.
Isomorphic was spun off from Google’s artificial intelligence research arm Google DeepMind in 2021, but remains a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent company, Alphabet. The startup’s potential has attracted large pharmaceutical partners, who want to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the expensive drug development process.
Hassabis previously told the FT that his team was working on six drug development programs with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is also the CEO of Google DeepMind, said that the search giant’s prototype AI assistant, known as Project Astra, is likely to be available to users later this year. He described a near future, within three years, when there will be “billions” of artificial intelligence agents, “negotiating with each other on behalf of suppliers and buyers” and said it would require rethinking the web itself.
He also called for more vigilance and coordination among leaders AI developers competing in building artificial general intelligence. He warned that technology could threaten human civilization if it gets out of control or is repurposed by “bad actors. . . for harmful purposes”.
Google DeepMind’s ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, or “a system capable of performing all the cognitive abilities that humans have,” according to Hassabis, who said that despite social media “hype” about it being close, true AGI was still five up to ten years.
“If something is possible and worth doing, people will do it,” Hassabis said. “We’re past that point now with artificial intelligence, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. . . so we have to do our best to bring it to the world as safely as possible.”
