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Not all AI companies want to slow down.
Chris Butler, who runs drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs, the Google-backed drug company started by DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, pushed back against the suggestion that calls by OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI leaders to pace frontier would slow his company down.
“We’re able to still progress regardless of what decisions are made elsewhere,” Butler said at the Semafor Future of Health Forum on Tuesday.
“All of our AI models are locked down and locked down in-house,” he added. “So, really, for us, it’s about, how do we use the models that we’ve built internally to help to accelerate the drug discovery process.”
Isomorphic, which was founded in 2021 as a DeepMind spinoff, raised $2.1 billion in its latest funding round in May, led by Thrive Capital, at an undisclosed valuation. It’s planning on plunging that money to help build out its pipeline and evolve its overall drug design; its drug discovery team is growing, with particular interest in oncology and immunology. “It is really important that we continue to see that progress toward the clinic,” he told Semafor’s healthcare reporter David Lim.
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Butler said the company is “on track” and moving “smoothly” through preclinical development efforts. The company is also collaborating with Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson. Butler declined to provide more details on the timeline for clinical trials.
Isomorphic is also trying to navigate the process of working with regulators about how it is using AI to accelerate drug development, Butler said. “That landscape is shifting to a point where the AI approach and bringing more in silico data to help to guide what development programs could look like is growing.”
“That’s got to be a partnership for us with the agency as we’re bringing molecules forward to know exactly what that looks like and help us work together with them. To bring that forward and to be able to decide what is needed, what needs expansion on, what is helpful in terms of working through the regulatory process and ultimately submission,” he added.
As regulators look to shrink the length of time spent on drug discovery, Isomorphic is betting on a way to quickly transition from discovery to early stage clinical trials.