Google DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Demis Hassabis, in a recent interview, said that its sister company, Isomorphic Labs, has the potential to build a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
“I hope to achieve both (commercial success and societal benefits) with Isomorphic and build a multi-100 billion dollar business. I think it has that potential,” said Hassabis without delving into the specific timeline.
The Alphabet-backed medtech lab, along with DeepMind, released AlphaFold 3 yesterday. The protein folding model predicts with 50% better accuracy.
“Well, if you ask me the number one thing AI can do for humanity, it will be to solve hundreds of terrible diseases. I can’t imagine a better use case for AI. So that’s partly the motivation behind Isomorphic and AlphaFold and all the work we do in sciences,” said Hassabis.
He believes that “revolutionising the drug discovery process to make it ten times faster” and more efficient and increasing the likelihood of passing clinical trials through better property prediction offers plenty of commercial value.
Future Vision
Looking towards the end of the year, Hassabis said that Google DeepMind will combine the agent systems it developed for gaming with multimodal systems into large general models that plan and achieve goals.
“So systems that are able not only to just answer questions for you, but actually plan and act in the world and solve goals and I think those are the things that will make these systems sort of the next level of usefulness in terms of being a useful everyday assistant,” he said. He further said that AI-designed drugs would probably be available in the ‘next couple of Years’
Brains Behind Isomorphic
Founded in 2021 by Hassabis, who also had a significant role even in DeepMind’s inception, Isomorphic endeavours to use AI in drug discovery and research on severe human diseases.
The brains behind Isomorphic include tech veteran Miles Congreve, serving as chief scientific officer, who contributed to the design of 20 clinical-stage drugs and co-invented Kisqali (Ribociclib), a marketed breast cancer treatment.
Also noteworthy is Sergei Yakneen‘s contribution, who is the chief technology officer with over two decades of expertise in engineering, machine learning, product development, and life sciences and medicine research.
The company recently announced key partnerships with two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies — Eli Lilly & Co. and Novartis AG. The deals are said to have a combined value of close to $3 billion.
