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CNBC: Inside Isomorphic Labs (Apr 2025)
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: CNBC
Relevant to AI safety discussions around the deployment of frontier AI capabilities in high-stakes domains; illustrates how leading AI labs are commercializing powerful tools with limited public governance frameworks in place.
Metadata
Importance: 38/100news articlenews
Summary
A CNBC profile of Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind, examining how it applies AlphaFold and frontier AI tools to accelerate pharmaceutical research. The piece covers the company's structure, major pharma partnerships, and ambitions to dramatically compress drug development timelines. It illustrates a key case study in deploying advanced AI capabilities in high-stakes real-world biomedical applications.
Key Points
- •Isomorphic Labs was spun out of Google DeepMind to commercialize AI tools like AlphaFold for drug discovery and pharmaceutical research.
- •The company has formed partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms, representing a significant step in AI deployment in life sciences.
- •AlphaFold's protein structure prediction capabilities are being leveraged to potentially compress drug development timelines from decades to years.
- •The profile raises implicit questions about governance and oversight when frontier AI systems are applied to high-stakes biomedical domains.
- •Isomorphic Labs exemplifies the broader trend of AI capability spinoffs targeting real-world impact in regulated, safety-critical industries.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Demis Hassabis | Person | 45.0 |
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Inside Isomorphic Labs, Google DeepMind’s AI life sciences spinoff Skip Navigation Markets Business Investing Tech Politics Video Watchlist Investing Club PRO Livestream Menu
Key Points Isomorphic Labs was spun out of Google DeepMind, after the tech giant achieved one of the biggest biological breakthroughs in the last 50 years.
Demis Hassabis is at the helm of both Isomorphic and DeepMind, the Google division at the forefront of the search company's efforts to compete in the tech industry's AI race.
On Wednesday, Isomorphic and Google DeepMind made AlphaFold3 available to the scientific community for non-commercial use, through Google Cloud.
With a fresh $600 million, Isomorphic is setting out to achieve its ultimate goal: to "solve all disease" through AI-powered drug discovery.
Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, attends the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 10, 2025. Benoit Tessier | Reuters On a rare sunny day in London at the Google DeepMind office, Colin Murdoch saw the bank deposit from his employer come through.
It wasn't his paycheck. Google was investing in his startup.
The fledgling company was Isomorphic Labs, the secretive artificial intelligence life sciences startup spun out of Google DeepMind after one of the biggest biological breakthroughs in the last 50 years. The check came in November 2021, and Murdoch was on the founding team.
As DeepMind's chief business officer, Murdoch was tasked with finding business applications for DeepMind's innovations in AI research. With Isomorphic, Murdoch wanted to zero in on the possibilities of AlphaFold2, an AI system with the capability of predicting the structures of proteins.
The viral program was developed by DeepMind in 2020 and helped solve a mystery that had flummoxed biologists for 50 years. If applied correctly, it had the potential to find new treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer. The system would go on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry.
It also helped Murdoch, and Isomorphic's founder Demis Hassabis, decide on an ultimate goal: to "solve all disease" through AI-powered drug discovery.
"When AlphaFold came along, I think Demis and I looked at this and we thought, 'Well, what could we do with AlphaFold?'" Murdoch, now Isomorphic's president, told CNBC in an interview by video chat. "Really, that was a signal that we could begin to apply AI in this world of drug discovery."
Hassabis remains with Isomorphic as CEO, and is simultaneously running DeepMind, the Google division at the forefront of the search company's efforts to compete in the tech industry's ongoing AI race. While Isomorphic is an independent unit of Google parent Alphabet , Hassabis' dual roles reflect the intertwined relationship between the two parties.
Isomorphic has never revealed how much Google initially invested in 2021. But last month,
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