Demis Hassabis’s drug discovery group accelerates spending to ‘solve’ disease
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Isomorphic Labs, the drug discovery start-up led by Sir Demis Hassabis, has accelerated spending on staff and research, as the new Nobel Prize winner expands an ambitious push to “solve” diseases.
The London-based group, spun off from Google DeepMind, the technology giant’s artificial intelligence arm, has reported that losses widened to £60mn in 2023, its first full year of operations. Losses reached £17mn a year earlier.
Research and development costs grew to £49mn last year, up from £12mn, according to accounts recently filed with Companies House. The company also increased hiring in 2023, with staff costs tripling from £6.6mn to £20mn and headcount up from 43 to 71.
The spending is a signal of Hassabis’s growing focus on Isomorphic Labs, which aims to accelerate drug discovery through the use of AI and commercialising technology developed by DeepMind.
The expanding losses are evidence of the vast investments required to develop artificial intelligence businesses, with huge amounts of computing power needed to run the predictive models behind the technology.
Isomorphic Labs, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, did not recognise any turnover in 2023 or 2022 to fund its expenses. However, it raised £182mn through a share issuance in August to its holding company.
DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs’ successes in drug discovery include its AlphaFold 2 AI system, which can accurately predict the structure of proteins, a discovery for which Hassabis and his DeepMind colleague John Jumper received the Nobel Prize for chemistry last week.
In May, it unveiled a new model, AlphaFold 3, that can also predict the structures of genetic code DNA and RNA, as well as ligands — molecules that bind to others and can be important markers of disease.
The AlphaFold findings have represented a huge advance for the pharmaceutical field and DeepMind has opened up access to the source code of AlphaFold 2 to the scientific community, a resource that is now widely used across the industry.
Isomorphic Labs’ potential to speed up the drug discovery process has also attracted big pharmaceutical partners who are keen to lower expenses and boost efficiency of the costly drug development process.
Hassabis told the Financial Times last week that his team was working on six drug development programmes with Eli Lilly and Novartis, focusing on disease areas such as cancers and Alzheimer’s. He expects to have a drug candidate in clinical trials within two years.
“I want us to help solve some diseases,” said Hassabis.
Isomorphic Labs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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