Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery spin-out of London-based Google AI R&D DeepMind, today announced that it has entered into strategic partnerships with two pharmaceutical giants, Eli Lilly and Novartis, to apply artificial intelligence to discover new drugs to treat diseases. .
The combined value of the deals is approximately $3 billion. Isomorphic will receive $45 million upfront from Eli Lilly and potentially up to $1.7 billion based on performance milestones, excluding equity. Meanwhile, Novartis will pay $37.5 million upfront, in addition to funding “certain” research costs and up to $1.2 billion (again excluding royalties) in performance-based incentives over time.
“We are thrilled to embark on this partnership and implement our technology platform,” Demis Hassabis, DeepMind co-founder and Isomorphic CEO, said in a press release. “The focus we share is the development of pioneering drug design approaches and an appreciation for the state-of-the-art science [these] partnership[s] “Particularly convincing.”
Fiona Marshall, head of biomedical research at Novartis, added in a statement: “Advancing AI technologies…have the potential to change the way we discover new medicines and accelerate our ability to deliver life-changing medicines to patients.” This collaboration leverages the unique strengths of our two companies, from AI and data science to medicinal chemistry and deep disease expertise, to realize new possibilities in AI-driven drug discovery.
Isomorphic, which Hassabis launched in 2021 under DeepMind’s parent company Alphabet, is based on DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 AI technology, which can be used to predict the structure of proteins in the human body. By revealing these structures, we hope that researchers can identify new target pathways for drug delivery to combat diseases.
Technology is not perfect. newly condition In the magazine nature He noted that AlphaFold sometimes makes obvious errors and, in many cases, is more useful as a “hypothesis generator” rather than a replacement for experimental data. But the scale at which the model can generate reasonably accurate protein predictions exceeds most of the methods that have come before.
Researchers newly AlphaFold was used to design and synthesize a potential drug to treat hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of primary liver cancer. DeepMind is collaborating with the Geneva-based Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, a non-profit pharmaceutical organization, to apply AlphaFold to formulate treatments for Chagas disease and leishmaniasis, two of the deadliest diseases in the developing world.
The latest version of AlphaFold can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, the world’s largest open-access database of biological molecules, DeepMind announced in October. The model can also accurately predict ligand structures — molecules that bind to “receptor” proteins and cause changes in how cells communicate — as well as nucleic acids (molecules that contain essential genetic information) and post-translational modifications (chemical changes that occur after a protein is made). .
Isomorphic is already applying the new AlphaFold model – which it co-designed with DeepMind – to design therapeutic drugs, helping to characterize different types of molecular structures important for treating diseases.
There is pressure on Isomorphic to start making a profit. In 2021, the company recorded a loss of £2.4 million (about US$3 million) as it increased hiring ahead of opening its second office location in Lausanne, Switzerland.