Google DeepMind has grand ambitions to ‘cure all diseases’ with AI. Now, it’s gearing up for its first human trials

AI·DeepMindGoogle DeepMind has grand ambitions to ‘cure all diseases’ with AI

Now, it’s gearing up for its first human trialsBY Beatrice NolanBY Beatrice NolanReporterBeatrice NolanReporterBeatrice Nolan is a London-based reporter at Fortune covering

Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs is preparing to launch human trials of AI-designed drugs, its president, Colin Murdoch, told Fortune

Born from DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, the company is pairing cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately

Alphabet’s secretive drug discovery arm, Isomorphic Labs, is getting ready to start testing its AI-designed drugs in humans, Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs president and Google DeepMind’s chief officer, told Fortune. “There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,” Murdoch said during an interview in Paris. “That’s happening right now. ” After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic’s AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight. “The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings,” he said. “We’re staffing up now

Interactions of AlphaFold gressed from being able to accurately predict individual tein structures to modeling how teins interact with other molecules DNA and drugs

These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping reers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition. “This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs,” Murdoch said of AlphaFold. “It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery. ” In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major re collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly

The deals are part of Isomorphic’s plan to build a “world-class drug design engine,” a system that combines machine learning reers with pharma veterans to design new medicines faster, more cheaply, and with a higher chance of success

As part of the deals with major pharma players, Isomorphic supports existing drug grams, but it also designs its own internal drug candidates in areas such as oncology and immunology, with the aim of eventually licensing them out after early-stage trials. “We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design grams

We develop those, put them into human clinical trials… we haven’t got that yet, but we’re making good gress,” he said

Murdoch believes Isomorphic’s could radically imve those odds. “We’re trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really imve the chance that we can be successful,” he says

He wants to harness AlphaFold’s nology to get to a point where reers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are are going to work in human trials. “One day we hope to be able to say — well, here’s a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease,” Murdoch said. “All powered by these amazing AI tools. ”Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in America

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