Google Ready To Start Human Trials Of Its AI-Designed Drugs
"There are people sitting in our office in King's Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. That's happening right now," said Mr Murdoch.
"The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings. We're staffing up now. We're getting very close."
Isomorphic Labs was born in the wake of DeepMind's revolutionary AlphaFold AI system that predicts protein structures with high level of accuracy. AlphaFold's creators, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both from DeepMind, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with David Baker from the University of Washington.
"This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Lab. It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery," said Mr Murdoch.
Isomorphic Labs
Since the beginning of Isomorphic Labs in 2021, it has partnered with major pharmaceutical companies like Novartis and Eli Lilly. The company secured $600 million in funding in April 2025 to accelerate the mission. Alongside supporting existing drug programmes, the company is researching and developing new drugs in fields like oncology and immunology.
Currently, pharma companies spend millions and years on a single drug development. With only a 10 per cent success rate in trials, Isomorphic Labs is aiming to use AI to boost the odds and reduce the resources required for the entire process.
"We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programs. We develop those, put them into human clinical trials...we haven't got that yet, but we're making good progress," said Mr Murdoch.
"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. 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. All powered by these amazing AI tools," he added.
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