Isomorphic signs agreements with Eli Lilly and Novartis to discover drugs
January 7 2024
Isomorphic Labs, an offshoot of Google’s AI research arm DeepMind, has announced partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly and Novartis, with agreements valued at approximately $3 billion. These partnerships aim to leverage artificial intelligence in the discovery of new drugs for various diseases. Isomorphic stands to earn up to $1.7 billion from Eli Lilly and $1.2 billion from Novartis in performance-based payments, in addition to initial sums of $45 million and $37.5 million, respectively. The collaboration will capitalize on Isomorphic’s use of AlphaFold 2 AI technology, pioneered by DeepMind to predict protein structures, which is essential for identifying new drug targets. Despite existing imperfections in the technology, AlphaFold has been instrumental in recent drug discovery efforts for conditions such as liver cancer and tropical diseases. Under pressure to become profitable after a financial loss in 2021, Isomorphic is also opening a new office in Switzerland while advancing the application of their latest AI model to drug design.
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What does it mean?
- Isomorphic Labs: A company that specializes in applying artificial intelligence to biotechnology and drug discovery, which branched out from another company, DeepMind.
- DeepMind: A company that specializes in artificial intelligence research and application, often known for its projects in machine learning, neural networks, and artificial general intelligence.
- Pharmaceutical companies: Companies that are involved in the research, development, production, and marketing of drugs licensed for use as medications.
- Artificial intelligence: A branch of computer science involving the development of machines or software that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
- Performance-based payments: A financial remuneration system where payments are contingent upon achieving certain agreed-upon benchmarks or milestones, commonly used in business agreements to incentivize performance.
- AlphaFold 2 AI technology: An advanced artificial intelligence program developed by DeepMind that predicts the 3D structure of proteins, which is crucial for understanding biological processes and developing new drugs.
- Protein structures: The unique three-dimensional shapes proteins fold into, which are determined by their amino acid sequences and are crucial for their function in biological processes.
- Drug targets: Biological molecules in the body that drugs can interact with to produce a therapeutic effect, such as proteins, DNA, or RNA.
- Drug discovery: The process by which new candidate medications are discovered or designed, typically involving the identification of active new compounds, their optimization into marketable drugs, and their pre-clinical and clinical testing.
- Liver cancer: A type of cancer that begins in the cells of the liver, a critical organ for metabolism and detoxification.
- Tropical diseases: Diseases that are primarily found in tropical and subtropical regions, often caused by infectious agents like parasites, viruses, or bacteria.
- Financial loss: A situation where a company's expenses exceed its revenues, resulting in a negative profit margin.
- Drug design: The inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target, using techniques like computer-aided design and synthetic biology for drug development.