AI-Designed Drugs by a DeepMind Spinoff Are Headed to Human Trials

AlphaFold from Google DeepMind has already revolutionized scientists’ understanding of proteins. Now, the platform’s ability to design safe and effective drugs is about to be put to the test.

Isomorphic Labs, the British biotech spin-off of Google DeepMind, will soon begin human trials of drugs designed by its Nobel Prize-winning AI technology. “We’re getting ready to go into the clinic,” Isomorphic Labs President Max Jaderberg told WIRED Health in London on April 16. “It will be a very exciting time as we move into clinical trials and begin to see the effectiveness of these molecules.”

Jaderberg did not specify the timeline, but the company had planned to launch human studies later. Last year, CEO Demis Hassabis said AI-designed drugs would enter clinical trials by the end of 2025.

Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 as a spin-off from Alphabet’s AI research subsidiary Google DeepMind. The company uses DeepMind’s AlphaFold, a revolutionary AI platform that predicts protein structures, for drug discovery.

Constructed from 20 different amino acids, proteins are essential to all living organisms. Long chains of amino acids link and fold to form a protein’s three-dimensional structure, which dictates its function. Researchers had been trying to predict protein structures since the 1970s, but it was a laborious process given the astronomical number of possible shapes a protein chain can take.

That changed in 2020, when Hassabis and DeepMind’s John Jumper presented astonishing results from AlphaFold 2, which uses deep learning techniques. A year later, the company released an open source version of AlphaFold available to everyone.

In 2024, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released AlphaFold 3, which further advanced scientists’ understanding of proteins. She went beyond modeling isolated proteins to predict other important molecules, such as DNA and RNA, and their interactions with proteins.

“That’s exactly what you need for drug discovery: You need to see how a small molecule is going to bind to a drug, how strongly and also what else it might bind to,” Hassabis told WIRED at the time.

Since its release, the AlphaFold platform has been able to predict the structure of almost all of the 200 million proteins known to researchers and has been used by more than 2 million people in 190 countries. The breakthrough earned Hassabis and Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, with the Nobel committee noting that AlphaFold has enabled a number of scientific applications, including better understanding antibiotic resistance and imaging enzymes capable of breaking down plastic.

Earlier this year, Isomorphic Labs announced an even more powerful tool called IsoDDE, its proprietary drug design engine. In a technical document, the company claims that the platform more than doubles the accuracy of AlphaFold 3.

The startup has formed partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis to work together on AI drug discovery and is also advancing its own “large and exciting pipeline of new drugs” in oncology and immunology, Jaderberg said.

“What’s exciting about the molecules that we’re designing is that we understand how they work so much better that we’ve designed them to be very, very potent,” Jaderberg told the WIRED Health audience. “You can take them at a much lower dose, and they will have fewer side effects, off-target effects.”

Last year, Isomorphic named a chief medical officer and announced it had raised $600 million in its first funding round to prepare for clinical trials. At the same time, the company established a clinical development team. Its mission is to “solve all diseases”.

“It’s a crazy mission,” Jaderberg said. “But we really mean it. We say it with a straight face, because we think it should be possible.”