How a Google DeepMind Spinoff Hunts Hidden Drug Targets

For more than a decade, artificial intelligence has been touted as a way to dramatically accelerate drug discovery . Yet despite billions of dollars in investment, relatively few AI-designed medicines have made it to patients. That’s partially because the timelines for careful drug testing can’t be easily compressed—and partially because drug development is just really hard. Isomorphic Labs , the Google DeepMind spinout that’s building on DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning work on protein structure prediction , may be making the most progress. The company has signed major drug-discovery partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly , recently raised US $2.1 billion in funding , and in February published a technical report describing its new Isomorphic Drug Design Engine, a system designed to discover the “pockets” on proteins where drugs can bind, and in general to predict how proteins and drug molecules interact. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Adrian Stecuła , a group leader…