Isomorphic raises $2.1bn for AI drug hunt
Isomorphic Labs' chief executive, Sir Demis Hassabis, delivering his Nobel Prize lecture in 2024.
Alphabet-backed start-up Isomorphic Labs has added to the lustre attached to its AI-powered drug discovery engine by raising an eye-watering $1.2 billion in a Series B led by US venture firm Thrive Capital.
The London, UK startup said the massive round – also supported by Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund – will be used to refine its IsoDDE discovery platform, fund international expansion, and progress its drug candidate pipeline.
It comes just over a year after Isomorphic, which is led by Google DeepMind founder Sir Demis Hassabis, raised $600 million in a first-round financing led by Thrive Capital and GV.
The sheer scale of the Series B is another endorsement of Isomorphic, coming on top of research collaborations with Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, and Eli Lilly in the last couple of years that are collectively worth billions of dollars.
The company was set up in 2021 to develop DeepMind's AlphaFold engine that, in 2020, became the first to solve the tricky problem of predicting protein folding, unlocking new ways to research how diseases affect the body and develop new medicines that can modify the activity of disease-related proteins.
Now in its third iteration, AlphaFold can predict the structure and relationships not only of proteins but just about any biological molecule, including RNA and DNA. The team behind AlphaFold has received significant recognition, including the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which went to Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker.
Isomorphic Labs recently published (PDF) a subset of the capabilities of IsoDDE, highlighting its predictive accuracy and introducing new capabilities which bridge the gap between structure prediction and real-world drug discovery.
In a statement, Isomorphic said the new financing will be used to move its drugs into clinical testing, fund additional hirings of experts in AI, engineering, drug design, and clinical development across its sites in London, Lausanne in Switzerland, and Cambridge in Massachusetts, US.
"This funding round is a massive vote of confidence from a diverse group of top-tier international investors in our AI-first approach to drug design and development," said Hassabis.
"Now that we have shown our approach is fundamentally sound, our focus is on scaling our technology to its full potential," he added. "This capital injection allows us to build out our drug design engine at scale, driving us forward in our mission to solve all disease."
