Google’s Isomorphic Labs secures $600M to accelerate AI drug discovery

Google’s bioscience arm Isomorphic Labs has secured $600 million in funding to accelerate its AI-driven drug discovery mission. The investment, led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital with participation from Google parent Alphabet, comes on the heels of impressive scientific achievements including Nobel Prize-winning work in protein structure prediction. This funding signals a major push to transform traditional pharmaceutical development by replacing time-consuming lab work with computational methods that can dramatically reduce drug discovery timelines.

The big picture: Isomorphic Labs, spun out from Google’s DeepMind AI research lab, is building on groundbreaking protein folding technology to revolutionize pharmaceutical development through computer simulation.

• The company aims to eventually conduct most drug discovery processes via computers rather than traditional biological laboratories that require physical materials and substantial time investments.
• The technology at Isomorphic’s core won its developers half of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, underscoring its scientific significance.

Behind the numbers: The $600 million investment was led by Thrive Capital, a venture firm with significant AI holdings including OpenAI, alongside Google Ventures and parent company Alphabet.

• This external funding represents a strategic shift for Isomorphic, which until now has operated as a division within Google’s broader corporate structure.
• The investment underscores growing confidence in AI’s potential to transform pharmaceutical research, a field traditionally characterized by high costs and lengthy development timelines.

The technology: Isomorphic builds on DeepMind’s AlphaFold system, which can predict the structure of millions of proteins and has expanded to model complex DNA and RNA behavior.

• AlphaFold, now in its third iteration, has advanced to the point where it can forecast how biological molecules will interact and behave—critical knowledge for drug development.
• The system’s capabilities have “promised to slash the development time of new drugs,” potentially addressing a key bottleneck in bringing treatments to market.

Key players: Demis Hassabis, who co-founded both DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, shared half of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with researcher John M. Jumper for their work on AlphaFold.

• Hassabis has positioned computational approaches as fundamentally more efficient than traditional lab-based drug discovery methods.

Why this matters: Pharmaceutical development traditionally takes years and billions of dollars, with high failure rates throughout the process.

• AI-powered structural biology could potentially identify promising drug candidates faster and with greater precision, potentially reducing costs and accelerating timelines for bringing new treatments to patients.