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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 brand new Nobel laureate expands his ambitious push to “solve” disease.
The London-based group, which spun out of Google DeepMind, the bogus intelligence arm of the tech giant, has reported that losses widened to £60 million in 2023, its first full yr of operation. A yr earlier, losses were £17 million.
Research and development costs rose from £12m to £49m last yr, in line with recent reports filed with Companies House. The company also increased recruitment in 2023, with staff costs tripling from £6.6m to £20m and headcount increasing from 43 to 71.
The spending is an indication that Hassabis is increasingly focused on Isomorphic Labs, which goals to speed up drug discovery through using AI and commercialization of technology developed by DeepMind.
The mounting losses are evidence of the large investments required to develop AI corporations, with enormous amounts of computing power required to run the predictive models behind the technology.
Isomorphic Labs, which was spun off from DeepMind in 2021 and is a completely owned subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, didn’t record revenue in 2023 and 2022 to fund its expenses. However, the corporate raised £182m in August through a share issue to its holding company.
DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs' successes in drug discovery include the AI system AlphaFold 2, which may accurately predict the structure of proteins – a discovery for which Hassabis and his DeepMind colleague John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week.
In May, it unveiled a brand new model, AlphaFold 3, that can even predict the structures of the genetic code DNA and RNA, in addition to ligands – molecules that bind to others and could be vital disease markers.
The AlphaFold results represented an incredible advance for the pharmaceutical field, and DeepMind has given the scientific community access to the AlphaFold 2 source code, a resource that’s now widely used throughout the industry.
Isomorphic Labs' potential to speed up the drug development process has also attracted major pharmaceutical partners involved in reducing costs and increasing efficiency of the costly drug development process.
Hassabis told the Financial Times last week that his team was working with Eli Lilly and Novartis on six drug development programs focused on disease areas resembling cancer and Alzheimer's. He expects a drug candidate to be in clinical trials inside two years.
“I need us to assist solve some diseases,” Hassabis said.
Isomorphic Labs didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
