As it enters the market, Isomorphic Labs, which was separated from Google’s AI division DeepMind last year, is expanding its staff. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also includes Calico, YouTube, Nest, and Fitbit under its wing in addition to the world-leading search engine.
Longevity Technology: Isomorphic Labs’ goal is to speed up and enhance the drug discovery process using AI and machine learning techniques. Isomorphic Labs, a leader in the developing field of “digital biology,” will use the capability of AlphaFold2, a platform that can predict the 3D structure of a protein straight from its amino acid sequence – with atomic-level accuracy, according to Demis Hassabis, the platform’s founder and CEO.
While proteins with similar sequences frequently adopt the same overall form, proteins with the same shape demonstrate enormous variability in terms of their sequences. Proteins are sequences of amino acids that bend and twist into 3D shapes to facilitate their function. So, while it can be simple to sequence a protein and determine its amino acid composition, determining what shape it will take has proven to be far more difficult.
Using deep learning neural networks that have been trained on hundreds of thousands of experimentally determined protein structures and sequences, DeepMind has developed a solution to the 50-year-old problem of protein structure prediction. This solution has enormous implications for drug discovery because it not only accurately predicts 3D models of protein structures but also pretty much every protein in the human body.
In order to speed up scientific research, the AlphaFold database offers free public access to over 200 million predictions of protein structures as well as individual downloads for the human proteome and the proteomes of 47 other important study animals.
According to The Financial Times, “Isomorphic has employed several executives and workers with experience in science, pharmaceuticals, and machine learning, creating computer systems that can learn from data.
The business is also opening a second office in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is home to a number of top pharmaceutical firms, including Roche, Novartis, and Bayer, as well as Isomorphic’s chief technical officer Sergei Yakneen [2].
“It takes about 10 years to take a drug [to market], and often most of them fail sadly, and so inspired by the work we did with AlphaFold, we took a deeper look… and basically built conviction that there was a real opportunity here to apply AI to reimagine drugs discovery [2],” said Colin Murdoch, chief business officer at DeepMind.
