Demis Hassabis’ Isomorphic Labs has raised $600m from OpenAI and Stripe-backer Thrive Capital, as it looks to advance its AI-designed drug candidates to clinical trials by the end of the year.
It’s the first external funding the startup, which spun out from Google DeepMind and has been funded by Alphabet up to this point, has raised. Google Ventures and Alphabet also participated.
Isomorphic Labs is looking to halve the time it takes to find new medicines. It has built on DeepMind’s breakthrough AlphaFold technology — which predicts how protein structures might interact with other molecules — to apply it to a wider range of biological molecules.
“This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programs into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI,” said Isomorphic Labs founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, in a statement.
In January, Hassabis said company hoped to have its first AI-designed drug in clinical trials by the end of 2025, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Isomorphic Labs — which is headquartered in London with an office in Lausanne, Switzerland — has established a drug discovery portfolio consisting of partnered programmes with pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novartis, as well as internal ones primarily focused in oncology and immunology.
Joshua Kushner, founder and CEO of Thrive Capital, called Isomorphic Labs a “category-defining company”.
“We believe Isomorphic has earned a rare position to define a new age of drug discovery and design, and we are deeply inspired by their mission and the extraordinary progress they have made to date.”
Isomorphic labs has been on a period of rapid growth since spinning out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2023 it quadrupled its R&D spend, according to company accounts published late last year, and raised £182m from parent company Alphabet in September.
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