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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year-old drug discovery startup owned by Google parent Alphabet, will test an artificial intelligence-designed drug by the end of this year, its founder said Sir Demis Hassabis.
“We are studying oncology, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, all the major disease areas, and I think by the end of this year we will have our first drug,” he said in an interview granted to the Financial Times at the World Economic. Forum.
“It generally takes on average five to ten years (to discover) a drug. And maybe we could speed up this process 10 times, which would be an incredible revolution for human health,” said Hassabiswho received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October with his colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Baker.
Isomorphic was spun off from Google’s AI research arm, Google DeepMind, in 2021, but remains a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent company, Alphabet. The start-up’s potential has attracted large pharmaceutical partners, eager to reduce expenses and improve efficiency in the costly drug development process.
Hassabis previously told the FT that his team was working on six drug development programs with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is also chief executive of Google DeepMind, said the search giant’s AI assistant prototype, known as Project Astra, would likely roll out to consumers later this year. He described a near future, three years from now, where there will be “billions” of AI agents, “negotiating with each other on behalf of the provider and the customer”, and said this would require rethinking the Web itself.
He also called for more caution and coordination among leaders AI developers compete to build artificial general intelligence. He warned that technology could threaten human civilization if it spins out of control or is reused by “bad actors”. . . for nefarious purposes.”
Google DeepMind’s ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, or “a system capable of showing all the cognitive abilities that humans have,” according to Hassabis, who said that despite the “hype” on social media at Regarding its proximity, the real AGI was still five to ten years away.
“If something is possible and useful to do, people will do it,” Hassabis said. “We’re past that point now with AI, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. . . so we have to try to make sure that we manage this around the world as safely as possible.