Isomorphic Labs, Google's A.I. Drug Business, Raises Money From Thrive
Over the last 12 months, Google's efforts to use artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design have achieved breakthroughs in mimicking human biology and won its top scientists the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now Isomorphic Labs, the division within the software giant meant to develop and commercialize the technology, is taking another big step: raising money from an outside investor.
Isomorphic plans to announce on Monday that it has raised $600 million, led by Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm that has bet big on A.I. companies including OpenAI. GV, Google's venture capital arm, and Alphabet, Google's parent company, also invested.
The announcement underscores Google's ambitions for Isomorphic, which was spun out of the company's DeepMind lab to focus on drugs discovery. It is built on software that DeepMind, a central intelligence lab in London, has developed. That includes AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of millions of proteins and more.
AlphaFold, which now in its third iteration can predict the complex behavior of DNA and RNA, has promised to slash the development time of new drugs. Such is its promise that Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of Isomorphic and DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a DeepMind researcher, shared half of the Nobel in chemistry last year.
The goal, according to Mr. Hassabis, is to eventually conduct most of the drug discovery process via computers, rather than traditional labs that require biological materials, strict safety requirements — and lots of time.
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