DeepMind spin-off aims to halve drug discovery times following Big Pharma deals

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The head of Google DeepMind believes its drug discovery spinout will halve the time taken to find new medicines, attracting the attention of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies which are looking to artificial intelligence to revolutionise the lengthy process.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Demis Hassabis, who co-founded Google’s AI unit and also leads the drugs offshoot Isomorphic Labs, said the goal was to reduce the discovery stage — when potential drugs are identified before clinical trials — from the average of five years to two. “I think that would be success for us and be very meaningful,” he said.

Hassabis stated the goal days after announcing Isomorphic Lab’s first two pharmaceutical partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis, which came to a combined value of up to $3bn, in deals set to transform the finances of the unprofitable group.

Isomorphic Labs uses an AI platform to predict biochemical structures, which aids the creation of new drugs by recommending which potential compounds will have the desired impact in the body.  

Including clinical trials, it often takes up to a decade to discover and develop a new drug, costing on average about $2.7bn, according to research by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. 

Large drugmakers, under pressure to fill their pipelines with new potential medicines while existing ones face patent cliffs, when they will face far cheaper generic competition, are eager for new ways to shorten the process. As healthcare systems around the world put pressure on drug prices, pharma companies are also looking for ways to cut costs in research and development. 

Hassabis said that many drugmakers had also been eager to partner with Isomorphic but the company wanted to focus on collaborations that could improve its technology. “We could probably sign up a dozen partnerships today, if we wanted to, but then it will cause us to fragment too much, to make more bespoke solutions for the individual programmes,” he said. 

Instead, Isomorphic chose to sign deals with just two pharmaceutical companies. On Sunday, it announced Lilly would pay $45mn upfront, with another $1.7bn to be paid when the project reached performance milestones, such as drugs reaching trials or approval.

Novartis would pay $37.5mn upfront with an additional $1.2bn in performance-based incentives.

Isomorphic said it planned to build up in-house experimental facilities or “wet labs” at some point in the future, and intended to partner these assets with pharmaceutical companies. 

Isomorphic’s deals come as Google faces fierce competition on the development of AI software from the likes of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and smaller start-ups such as Anthropic and Cohere. Last year, the search giant merged its internal AI unit Brain with DeepMind, in an effort to concentrate its efforts and resources in the fast-moving technology.

The partnership deals follow several others in the industry. Oxford-based Exscientia is working with Sanofi and Bristol Myers Squibb, among others, and Insitro has a deal with Bristol Myers, while Owkin is also collaborating with Sanofi. 

But even drugs discovered by artificial intelligence can fail in clinical trials, as human biology is hard to predict. Several start-ups specialising in AI for drug discovery have had to abandon drugs after studies showed they were not as effective as hoped.

Isomorphic Labs’ AI platform builds on the scientific breakthroughs achieved by DeepMind’s AlphaFold technology, AI software that can predict the structure of nearly all existing proteins from their DNA sequence.

New generations of the technology use deep learning to predict interactions between proteins and other molecules, including DNA and RNA, and therefore the side effects and efficacy of new chemical structures in the body.

Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of Alphabet, to advance DeepMind’s initial breakthroughs with an exclusive focus on using AI for drug discovery. The company in 2022 widened its loss to £16.9mn from £2.4mn the year before, according to Companies House filings.

Hassabis said that, although Isomorphic was not “focused on” when it would generate a profit, “the two deals we have done are pretty meaningful from a financial point of view too”.

Interest in using AI in drug discovery is soaring, with companies in the sector raising $4.4bn in 2022, up from $1.8bn in 2018, according to research firm PitchBook.

But Hassabis said Isomorphic was “pretty unique” in trying to build fundamental models of biology and chemistry, rather than using AI for analysis of existing data.

​​“It’s almost like a generative model that is designing the compounds with the different constraints,” he said. “But those constraints are modelling real biochemistry constraints. So that’s what we’re really good at.”