Over the last 12 months, Google’s efforts to use artificial intelligence to accelerate drug design have achieved breakthroughs in mimicking human biology and won its top scientists the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Now Isomorphic Labs, the division within the software giant meant to develop and commercialize the technology, is taking another big step: raising money from an outside investor.
Isomorphic announced on Monday that it had raised $600 million, led by Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm that has bet big on A.I. companies including OpenAI. GV, Google’s venture capital arm, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also invested.
The announcement underscores Google’s ambitions for Isomorphic, which was spun out of the company’s DeepMind lab to focus on drugs discovery. It is built on software that DeepMind, a central intelligence lab in London, has developed. That includes AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of millions of proteins and more.
AlphaFold, which in its third iteration can now predict the complex behavior of DNA and RNA, has promised to slash the development time of new drugs. Such is its promise that Demis Hassabis, a co-founder of Isomorphic and DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a DeepMind researcher, shared half of the Nobel in chemistry last year.
The goal, according to Mr. Hassabis, is to eventually conduct most of the drug discovery process via computers, rather than traditional labs that require biological materials, strict safety requirements — and lots of time.
“This is the No. 1 most beneficial application of A.I. out there,” Mr. Hassabis said in an interview. He added, “Our mission, one day, is to solve all disease” with A.I.
Isomorphic is researching potential treatments, including those focused on cancer and immune disorders. Last year, it signed research partnerships with two major drug makers, Eli Lilly and Novartis, that could yield billions in payouts via promising drugs breakthroughs.
But as with many things related to A.I., the work, and the hiring of top research talent to perform it, is expensive. Mr. Hassabis said that Isomorphic didn’t need capital — its parent company reported more than $100 billion in profit last year — but that it made sense to bring in an outside partner.
By Mr. Hassabis’s thinking, doing so had long been a possibility. But he added that he had wanted a backer fixed on the long term that was also deeply focused on life sciences.
The additional money will help Isomorphic expand its stable of research models like AlphaFold, as well as recruit top talent across scientific disciplines.
“The ambition of the company is to be a full stack life science company, so that requires more capital to create more drugs while also investing in the technology platform,” said Vince Hankes, a Thrive partner who has led many of the firm’s A.I. investments.
Mr. Hassabis added that he wanted to be selective in Isomorphic’s partners; formal talks with Thrive took place over a matter of months.
The fund-raising is another major bet by the 15-year-old Thrive, which has minted money investing in companies like Instagram and the payments processor Stripe. Of late, it has centered on A.I. companies, including leading a recent round in OpenAI that nearly doubled its valuation to $157 billion, as well as the analytics provider Databricks and the programming start-up Anysphere.
“Our hope is that A.I. radically changes the way drugs are created and discovered,” said Joshua Kushner, Thrive’s founder and managing partner. “Isomorphic is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in small-molecule drug discovery.”
Over the next year or so, Isomorphic hopes to have made more breakthroughs in computational models like AlphaFold and perhaps have drug candidates get close to preclinical trials, Mr. Hassabis said.
Isomorphic will probably raise money from more outside investors, he added. The goal is for the company to be an independent business.
“This will be one of the most consequential companies around,” he said. “We want it to be a real powerhouse in the industry.”
