Isomorphic Labs president Jaderberg says that all drugs in the future will be designed by AI, but the company is still in the preclinical stage. Is that a prediction, or a timeline?
There’s no shortage of progress on the model side: spun out of Google DeepMind, the company has continued developing drugs building on AlphaFold’s breakthrough, provided R&D technology to Eli Lilly and Novartis, raised a total of about $2.7 billion, and discussed a $40 billion valuation in its latest funding round. Jaderberg himself says that humans aren’t actually very good at developing drugs, and that it’s a miracle we have so many good ones. The bottleneck is on the other side: in January, CEO Hassabis said the plan was to launch the first clinical trials by the end of the year, but the company is still preclinical.
It’s just one step from preclinical to clinical.
So before the claim that all drugs will be designed by AI can be tested, those trials planned for the end of the year need to happen—not model evaluations.
There’s no shortage of progress on the model side: spun out of Google DeepMind, the company has continued developing drugs building on AlphaFold’s breakthrough, provided R&D technology to Eli Lilly and Novartis, raised a total of about $2.7 billion, and discussed a $40 billion valuation in its latest funding round. Jaderberg himself says that humans aren’t actually very good at developing drugs, and that it’s a miracle we have so many good ones. The bottleneck is on the other side: in January, CEO Hassabis said the plan was to launch the first clinical trials by the end of the year, but the company is still preclinical.
It’s just one step from preclinical to clinical.
So before the claim that all drugs will be designed by AI can be tested, those trials planned for the end of the year need to happen—not model evaluations.
