Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI drug discovery startup, spun out of Google’s DeepMind unit just over two years ago, 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. Isomorphic Labs will partner with Lilly for small molecule therapeutics, receiving an upfront payment of $45 million and up to $1.7 billion in milestone payments, excluding royalties. Similarly, with Novartis, Isomorphic Labs gets a $37.5 million upfront payment, funding for select research costs, and up to $1.2 billion in milestone payments, along with royalties on net sales.

Founded in 2021 by Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs primarily focuses on small molecule therapeutics, which are easier to manufacture and deliver. The company utilises AlphaFold, an AI system developed by DeepMind to predict a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

Alphafold’s latest iteration, released in October 2023, unlocks new insights and significantly improves accuracy across multiple key biomolecule classes, including ligands (small molecules), proteins, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), and those containing post-translational modifications (PTMs). Furthermore, it can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), often achieving atomic accuracy.

Why Eli Lilly and Novartis 

Eli Lilly and Novartis both are actively engaged in research and development in the field of small molecule therapeutics. Small molecules are compounds with low molecular weight that can easily enter cells, making them suitable for drug development.

Eli Lilly had previously collaborated with Prism Biolab to develop and commercialise small molecules modulating targets selected by Lilly. This partnership leverages Prism’s PepMetics technology platform to explore oral protein-protein interaction (PPI) targets.

Lilly has made several moves in the last couple of years to develop small-drug molecules. The company was one of the investors in Alto Neuroscience’s $45m Series C financing round, which will support Alto’s clinical programme of four small-molecule CNS candidates to treat psychiatric disorders including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Moreover, Eli Lilly recently acquired POINT, a radiopharmaceutical company with a pipeline of clinical and preclinical-stage radioligand therapies in development for the treatment of cancer. Radioligand therapy can enable the precise targeting of cancer by linking a radioisotope to a targeting molecule that delivers radiation directly to cancer cells, enabling significant anti-tumor efficacy while limiting the impact to healthy tissue.

Meanwhile, Novartis is also working on creating new small molecules to target cancer in areas that were once considered undruggable. Novartis has recently teamed up with the University of California Berkeley, to open a centre specifically focused on the part of the proteome that has historically been challenging to address with small molecules. The collaboration aims to identify protein binding pockets and establish starting points for developing new therapeutic approaches.

Generative AI and Drug Discovery 

The collaboration between generative AI and pharmaceutical firms is set to lead the way in new drug discovery.

AstraZeneca has recently partnered with Absci, a startup specialising in generative AI antibody discovery technology, to expedite the discovery of novel cancer treatments.

At the same time, NVIDIA introduced NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI platform that offers services to develop, customise, and deploy foundation models for drug discovery. Much like AlphaFold, BioNeMo features a growing collection of pre-trained biomolecular AI models for protein structure prediction, protein sequence generation, molecular optimization, generative chemistry, docking prediction and more. 

Various companies are using NVIDIA BioNeMo for biology, chemistry, and genomics research. For example, Terray Therapeutics integrates BioNeMo cloud APIs into its multi-target structural binding model development. 

Innophore and Insilico Medicine apply BioNeMo to computational drug discovery, with Innophore incorporating it into the Catalophore platform, and Insilico using it in their generative AI pipeline for early drug discovery.

Overall, the partnerships with Novartis and Eli Lilly offer Isomorphic Labs a potent combination of financial resources, industry expertise, and market validation. This will significantly accelerate their efforts in developing innovative small molecule therapeutics and ultimately bring their life-saving drugs to patients faster.