Isomorphic Labs sets up US presence in Cambridge, with an eye on clinical trials

Boston Globe

5 hours ago

After developing AlphaFold into a drug design platform, the company has entered the era where it is progressing some of those AI-enabled drug candidates toward clinical trials — and to do that, it needs a footprint in the United States.
Isomorphic's move comes during a particularly turbulent period for the
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Its first hire in Cambridge is Ben Wolf, who will work from the new office as the company's chief medical officer to build Isomorphic's clinical development team. Wolf was most recently CMO at Relay Therapeutics, whose cancer drug targets have been informed by computational discovery methods.
At the end of March, Isomorphic Labs announced a
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'We're advancing quickly towards the clinic,' said Murdoch. 'As you think about the initial focus of the team in Boston and hiring of Ben, it hits squarely in that second bracket.'
Earlier this year, Isomorphic announced development partnerships with US-based Eli Lilly and Switzerland-based Novartis worth $82.5 million up front, with nearly $3 billion in potential value. It also has internal assets in development in oncology and immunology. 'Whether they're headquartered in Boston or not, they've got a strong presence there, so it's helpful to be close to our partners,' said Murdoch, who declined to project clinical timelines for any of the drug candidates.
Isomorphic's new office — which has yet to find a permanent home — comes at a
The Cambridge office will start small, with up to a dozen employees focused on getting trials off the ground. That's less than a tenth of Isomorphic's total headcount, with about 200 employees concentrated in a central London office and to a smaller extent, in a newer office in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Later on, the Cambridge office plans to recruit in other areas — including medicinal chemistry, machine learning, and computational biology — as it continues developing its drug engines. Earlier iterations focused on small molecule drugs, the target of Isomorphic's current pharma partnerships, but the company has expanded to biologics. 'Technically, the platform models everything in terms of atoms,' said Murdoch. 'Biologics and small molecules look pretty much the same when you look at them at that level.'
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Despite Wolf's clinical development expertise, Murdoch said the chief medical officer would also be involved in moving Isomorphic's drug engine forward. 'It sounds a bit out of sequence, because you would normally think about it as a linear process,' he said. But 'in the end, what we're trying to do is create drugs that do work in humans in the clinic. So why not bring forward those insights at the beginning?'