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While humans are typically living longer than they used to do thanks to advances in science and medicine, we're not exactly immortal machines (which is probably a good thing).
Sadly, diseases like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes, and more mean we have only a finite time on planet Earth.
What if it were different?
There are obvious concerns about the human race relying more and more on artificial intelligence by the day, but instead of just taking our jobs or potentially taking over the world for nefarious reasons, some are determined to use AI for good.
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We're already at a point where we need AI for society to survive, so why not make the best use of it to try and further humanity?
As reported by Fortune, Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a secret lab that's looking at curing all of the world's diseases.
Colin Murdoch is the president of Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs, telling the outlet how the team is combining "cutting-edge AI with pharma veterans to design medicines faster, cheaper, and more accurately."
With years of development already under Isomorphic Labs' belt, human trials of these AI-assisted drugs are hopefully just around the corner.
Hyping the importance of the work, Murdoch explained: "There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. That’s happening right now."
Looking even further ahead, Murdoch said: "The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings. We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close."
Spinning out from DeepMind in 2021, Isomorphic Labs was born from the AlphaFold breakthrough that created an AI system that's able to predict protein structures. This then evolved into accurately predicting how proteins interact with molecules, including DNA and drugs.
Alongside releasing AlphaFold 3 in 2024, Isomorphic agreed on massive research collabs with pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Eli Lilly. This was continued in a $600 external funding round in April 2025.
If you’ll be at ICML between 13-19 July, you can register to connect with some of our ML team at the event, and find out more about our work as well as current opportunities at Isomorphic Labs. Make sure you catch @_lychrel and @benrozemberczki’s talk too.
— Isomorphic Labs (@IsomorphicLabs) July 10, 2025
If you would like to… pic.twitter.com/QHDMXIxfLL
Murdoch continued: "This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs. It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery.”
All of the above should help Isomorphic's "world-class drug design engine,” which is a system that hopes to design new medicines faster than ever, with a higher chance of success, and pass those savings onto patients thanks to being cheaper: "We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programs. We develop those, put them into human clinical trials… we haven’t got that yet, but we’re making good progress."
Pharma companies spend millions to try and bring just one drug to the market, and with it having just a 10% of success in trials, Murdoch thinks AI could massively improve these odds.
Even if we're not quite there, Murdoch has grand plans for the future of Isomorphic Labs: "One day we hope to be able to say — well, here’s a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease. All powered by these amazing AI tools."
