New Alphabet Company Develops AI To Find Drugs

 




A new company from Alphabet has announced that it will use artificial intelligence (AI) methods to find drugs.

The parent company of Google said the work will be carried out by DeepMind, another Alphabet subsidiary, which focuses on doing innovative AI-based things like measuring protein structure to find new drugs.


The new company, called Isomorphic Laboratories, will leverage the success of Google's AI to help identify new types of drugs.



DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis will also serve as CEO for Isomorphic, but the two companies will remain separate and collaborate occasionally.


For years, experts have used AI as an easy and fast way to create and discover new drugs that can treat various ailments.


AI can help scan through databases of potential molecules to find some that best suit a particular biological target, for example, or to refine a proposed compound.


Isomorphic will try to build a model that can predict how the drug will interact with the body.


Hassabis said Isomorphic could leverage DeepMind's work on protein structure to figure out how multiple proteins might interact with one another.


He also added that the company may not develop the drug itself but sell the model. It will focus on developing partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.


Developing and testing a drug, however, can be a more formidable challenge than figuring out the structure of a protein. For example, even if two proteins have a physically compatible structure, it's hard to say how well they actually stick together.


More than 90 percent of drugs that make it to clinical trials end up not working, as chemist and author Derek Lowe in Science pointed out this summer. Most of the problem isn't that something went wrong at the molecular level.


The work being done at DeepMind and the proposed work at Isomorphic could help overcome some research barriers but not a quick fix for countless drug development challenges.


"The grueling and resource-consuming work of conducting biochemical and biological evaluations, for example the function of drugs, will remain," said Helen Walden, a professor of structural biology at the University of Glasgow.

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