Isomorphic Labs, a spinoff of Google DeepMind, is preparing to begin clinical trials for drugs designed by its AI technology.

“We're gearing up to go into the clinic,” Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg said on April 16th at WIRED Health in London. “It's going to be a very exciting moment as we go into clinical trials and start seeing the efficacy of these molecules.”

The timeline is not yet set, but it’s already past the original date, the end of 2025, when DeepMind expected to start clinical trials.

Google DeepMind has played a major role in drug discovery, primarily through AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts 3D protein structures. It has predicted the structures of all the 200 million proteins known to science and is used by more than 2 million people across 190 countries.

The company is now applying those discoveries to design new drugs through partnerships with firms like Eli Lilly and Novartis, and to advance its “broad and exciting pipeline of new medicines” in oncology and immunology, Jaderberg said.

Its new computational drug-design system, IsoDDE, more than doubles the accuracy of AlphaFold 3.

“The exciting thing about the molecules that we're designing is because we have so much more of an understanding about how these molecules work, we've engineered them to be very, very potent,” Jaderberg said. “You can take them at a much lower dose, and they'll have lower side effects, off-target effects.”

In a February press release, Isomorphic Labs said that despite AlphaFold 3’s significant performance improvements, one key challenge remains: predicting biomolecular structures alone is not enough to produce real-world drugs, making it difficult to turn these predictions into actual medicines.

Last year, Isomorphic Labs announced that it had raised $600 million in its first external funding round to help it accelerate drug discovery and deliver biomedical breakthroughs.

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