The place of artificial intelligence in biological and medical research is increasingly important. In the middle of this year, the system AlphaFold made a significant contribution to humanity by predicting the 3D structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. On that basis, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has announced the creation of Isomorphic Labs, a company focused on drug discovery.
“The pandemic has highlighted the vital work that brilliant scientists and doctors do every day to understand and fight disease. We believe that the fundamental use of cutting-edge computing and artificial intelligence methods can help scientists carry their work to the next level, “says Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind and now also Isomorphic Labs.
The axis of this new company will be to drastically accelerate the entire process for drug discovery. Precisely, at present this is a complex, slow and expensive process. On average, it takes between 10 and 13 years for the development of new drugs. However, artificial intelligence could significantly reduce these times.
Artificial intelligence at the service of health
Artificial intelligence has reached a point where it is not just for analyzing data. It can also be used, as DeepMind has shown, to create predictive and generative models of complex biological phenomena. AlphaFold2 took a huge step in that direction in June of this year. Now, from the hand of Isomorphic Labs and the companies that are associated with it, many more advances could come.
“Biology is likely to be too complex and messy to be encapsulated as a simple set of ordered mathematical equations. But just as mathematics turned out to be the proper description language for physics, biology may turn out to be the perfect type of regimen for the application of artificial intelligence “.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Isomorphic Labs
Little else is known about this new Alphabet venture. The publication of Blog indicates that they will build “a computational platform to understand biological systems from the first principles to discover new ways to treat diseases.” Now it only remains to wait to begin to know the results of this type of mechanisms based on artificial intelligence.