Google: Creates new artificial intelligence company to discover new drugs

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has created Isomorphic Labs, a new British artificial intelligence company, to develop new drugs.

It will be led by Demis Hassabis, who is also the founder and CEO of London-based artificial intelligence company Deep Mind, now a subsidiary of Google and a world leader in artificial intelligence.

Isomorphic Labs will build on Deep Mind’s pioneering international research to date, focusing on the pharmaceutical field, with Hassabis, according to the Financial Times and the New York Times, “to accelerate new drugs and eventually find cures for some of humanity’s deadliest diseases. ”

Deep Mind’s latest biomedical achievement was in July the development of the new “smart” AlphaFold 2 system that can predict with almost perfect accuracy the shape of every protein in the human body.

Isomorphic Labs will work with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and is already hiring staff in many specialties. It is going to develop artificial intelligence beyond the AlphaFold 2 system (which has become widely available to other scientists and has not been kept a trade secret) to predict the evolution of complex phenomena, without giving further details about its future activities.

Hassabis said: “At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be considered as an information processing system, although one that is remarkably complex and dynamic. From this point of view, there can be an underlying structure between biology. and in information science – an isomorphic mapping between them – hence the name of the new company “.

The Google Group also includes other companies that focus on health, such as Verily (which deals with a wide range from surgical robots to smart contact lenses for diabetics) and Calico (which focuses on treating aging and prolonging life). life).