AI-developed drug will be in trials by year-end, says Google’s Hassabis

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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year-old drug discovery start-up owned by Google parent Alphabet, will have an AI-engineered drug in trials by the end of this year, its founder Sir Demis Hassabis said.

“We’re looking at oncology, cardiovascular, neurodegeneration, all the big disease areas, and I think we’ll have our first drug by the end of this year,” he told the Financial Times at the World Economic Forum.

“It usually takes an average of five to 10 years [to discover] one medicine And maybe we could speed it up 10 times, which would be an incredible revolution in human health,” he said. Hasabiswho received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October with his colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Baker.

Isomorph spun out of Google’s artificial intelligence research unit Google DeepMind in 2021, but remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of its parent company, Alphabet. The startup’s potential has attracted big pharma partners looking to cut costs and increase the efficiency of the costly drug manufacturing process.

Hassabis previously told the FT that his team was working on six drug development programs with Eli Lilly and Novartis.

In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is also the CEO of Google DeepMind, said that a prototype of the search giant’s artificial intelligence assistant, known as Project Astra, would likely be available to consumers later this year. when there are “billions” of AI agents “negotiating with each other on behalf of the seller and the customer” and said it would require rethinking the web.

He also called for more caution and coordination among leaders AI developers race to create artificial general intelligence. He warned that the technology could threaten human civilization if it gets out of hand or is repurposed by “bad actors . . . for harmful purposes”.

Google DeepMind’s ultimate goal is to create an artificial general intelligence, or “a system capable of displaying all the cognitive abilities of humans,” according to Hassabis, who says that despite social media’s “buzz” about how close real AGI- was still five to 10 years away.

“If something is possible and worthwhile, people will do it,” Hassabis said. . so we have to try and make sure we get that out into the world as safely as possible.”