Alphabet Launched a New Drug Discovery Company

Alphabet continues to expand its operations. Google’s parent company launched a new drug discovery company in the U.K. called Isomorphic Labs.

The company founded by Alphabet will build on research carried out by London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind. Google acquired DeepMind several years ago more precisely in 2014. Even though the company was only officially announced several days ago, it was incorporated in February, according to a filing with Companies House.

DeepMind’s CEO and co-founder Dennis Hassabis is also the founder as well as CEO of Isomorphic Labs. Hassabis will remain CEO of DeepMind.

In a blog post, Dennis Hassabis described a new company as a commercial venture. Its goal is to “reimagine the entire drug discovery process from the ground up”.

The company’s spokesperson stressed that the company is separate from DeepMind. Isomorphic Labs has its own dedicated resources. Nonetheless, they stopped short of saying how many employees or how much capital it has at its disposal.

Alphabet and new opportunities

The company founded by Alphabet plans to use artificial intelligence software to create new drugs and medicines.

It is not an easy task to identify new drugs. It is a complex trial-and-error process that involves combining lots of different compounds in different ways. Isomorphic Labs is not alone as other companies also believe that AI can speed up the process.

The tech giant has several other companies working on health care including Verily, which is developing software for the health care sector Another company Calico is working on aging as well as extending human life.

DeepMind used to have its own dedicated DeepMind Health Division. However, its health subsidiary became part of Google in 2018. Since then, the company pursued research in other areas of life science. DeepMind made breakthroughs in a field known as protein folding.