Google DeepMind's Spinoff Company 'Very Close' to Human Trials for Its AI-Designed Drugs (fortune.com)
- Reference: 0178296950
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/07/06/2124226/google-deepminds-spinoff-company-very-close-to-human-trials-for-its-ai-designed-drugs
- Source link: https://fortune.com/2025/07/06/deepmind-isomorphic-labs-cure-all-diseases-ai-now-first-human-trials/
> "There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer," said Colin Murdoch [DeepMind's chief business officer and president of Isomorphic Labs]. "That's happening right now."
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> 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. We're getting very close."
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> The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind's most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy. Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs. These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition... In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly. A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital. The deals are part of Isomorphic's plan to build a "world-class drug design engine..."
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> Today, pharma companies often spend millions attempting to bring a single drug to market, sometimes with just a 10% chance of success once trials begin. Murdoch believes Isomorphic's tech could radically improve those odds. "We're trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful," he says. He wants to harness AlphaFold's technology to get to a point where researchers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are developing 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."
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/07/06/deepmind-isomorphic-labs-cure-all-diseases-ai-now-first-human-trials/
Stupidity is not a disease (Score:2)
so good luck with pressing your button.
"AI" is good fit for drug discovery (Score:3)
Traditional calculations on proteins are very, very hard as the amount of approximations needed to get from the fundamental physics equations to something you can actually get into a super computer are so many, that the results are totally unreliable. Sometimes there are some correlation with experiments, sometimes it is just a noise generator - and it is hard to tell why. Machine learning models can do similar if not better predictions for less.
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And then there's the toxicity screening part. You have to find something that adequately binds to your target in an inhibitory manner AND make sure it won't bind or accumulate anywhere else in a human body. And if it's a treatment for cancer you have to make sure that it will be infeasible for the tumor to use any of the mechanisms of resistance to evade it.
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Toxicity screening part became easy because AlphaFold2 created 3D model of all human proteins, so you just need to run the binding test against all of those to see if you have unwanted side effects or not. If the drug doesn't bind, it shouldn't in theory have any side effect.
Drug delivery (Score:2)
If they can figure out how to make an LNP that can efficiently deliver a large mRNA payload (30kb) into every cell type, EVERY disease suddenly becomes curable -- today.
How? Because if you can put 30kb of RNA into a cell ... you can make all kinds of stuff. You can basically create a science lab within the cell to detect and fix what's broken (or destroy the cell if it is cancerous and has unwanted mutations).
Re: Drug delivery (Score:2)
In theory. If you can get it into the right cells. HIV for instance lays dormant in reservoirs. That's one reason it has only been treated and not cured yet, outside of very dangerous bone marrow transplants that replace the entire immune system.
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If you can deliver 30 kb of RNA into every cell, you can excise that HIV from any such reservoir cells that contain latent provirus copies. Specifically, there's easily enough within 30kb to include gene excision tools such as CRISPR (which is only around 4kb max) and any other genes you may need to ensure you've fished it out. And btw, 30 kb is not an unreasonable size .. the coronavirus is about that size. Herpes is 150 kb.
Sorry, but... (Score:1)
I would not trust AI to write a comedy routine. Why on Earth would any SANE person trust some experiment in language processing to design a new drug???
Has everybody forgotten the whole COVID-19 thing already? We had a government official declare himself to be "the science" and help push-through an entirely new sort of vaccine without any reasonable testing regime, resulting in a drug pushed onto the public as [1]"100% effective" [rumble.com] but later shown to be possibly no more effective than a sugar pill and officials a
[1] https://rumble.com/vnprrw-video-clowns-fauci-et-al-over-rapidly-devolving-narrative-on-vaccine-effect.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_m
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You realize that most modern blockbuster drugs, such as the ones that basically cured AIDS were designed on a computer right?
The AI will design a drug, and then it will be tested extensively on cells in a lab. If it works there, then it will be tested in a mouse. After that, it will be given to a human in a trace amount to see safety. If there is no impact, then the dose is escalated to the treatment dosage. Oh and sometimes before it goes to human it will be tested on primate.
Once it is shown that the AI i
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Personally I would rather take AI designed drug that is not tested in ANY way in any animal or human. Than take a drug that has gone through all required animal and human tests. But that is only because I know how they test them with the AI.
But luckily for you and perhaps for me also. They will have to run all the same animal and human tests for the new drugs, before they are taken into use. So these drugs will be at least as safe as any traditional drugs would be. But because AI can actually check the bind
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Literally nothing that you said in that entire post is true.
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It depends how bad the problem you're suffering with is...
If the choice is between "100% agonising death" and "a drug that has a 1% chance of curing you or 99% change of agonising death" many sane people would choose the latter.
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> I would not trust AI to write a comedy routine. Why on Earth would any SANE person trust some experiment in language processing to design a new drug???
The term AI is what is confusing you. This AI here is not a language model, and they are not asking questions to a chatbot. It's a physics simulation code, that uses a neural network trained on results of structure and properties of known molecules.
Instead of using classical physics computations on millions of randomly-chosen variations on molecules, that is so time consuming it can't be done, the neural network "guesses" molecular structures that should implement the desired physical/chemical effects, base
In other words: Still vapor (Score:2)
Before they have completed at the very least Stage 1 human trials, this is all without significance.
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No, "we" don't.