Deep inside Alphabet, the parent company of Google, a secretive lab is working on a promise so audacious it sounds like science fiction: to “solve all diseases.” The company, Isomorphic Labs, is now preparing to start its first human clinical trials for cancer drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence.
In a recent interview with Fortune, Colin Murdoch, President of Isomorphic Labs and Chief Business Officer of Google DeepMind, confirmed the company is on the verge of this monumental step. For anyone who has watched a loved one battle a devastating illness, the hope this offers is immense. But for a public increasingly wary of AI’s power, it raises a chilling question: can we really trust a “black box” algorithm with our lives?
Isomorphic Labs was born from DeepMind’s celebrated AlphaFold breakthrough, the AI system that stunned scientists by predicting the complex 3D shapes of proteins. To understand why this is a big deal, you need to know how drugs are traditionally made. For decades, it’s been a slow, brutal process of trial and error. Scientists spend an average of 10 to 15 years and over a billion dollars to bring a single new drug to market, with most candidates failing along the way.
Isomorphic Labs uses its AI, AlphaFold 3, to radically accelerate this. The AI can predict the complex 3D structures of proteins in the human body with stunning accuracy, allowing scientists to digitally design new drug molecules that are perfectly shaped to fight a specific disease, all before ever entering a physical lab
The company has already signed multi-billion dollar deals with pharmaceutical giants Novartis and Eli Lilly, and just raised $600 million in new funding to move its own drug candidates—starting with oncology—into human trials. The promise is a medical utopia. “This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programs into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI,” CEO Sir Demi Hassabis, who won the 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry for his pioneering work on AlphaFold 2, said back in March.
But when Big Tech starts designing medicine, who owns your cure? This is where deep-seated fears about AI’s role in our lives come into focus. The biggest concern is the “black box” problem: we know the AI gives an answer, but we don’t always know how. This raises critical questions:
- Will Alphabet own the next cancer drug like it owns your search results?
- Will these AI-designed treatments be affordable, or will they be trapped behind sky-high patents accessible only to the wealthy?
- Will human trial standards keep up with the sheer speed of machine-generated breakthroughs?
- And who is liable if an AI-designed drug goes wrong? The company that owns the AI? The programmers? The AI itself?
When contacted by Gizmodo, a spokesperson for Isomorphic Labs said the company “don’t have anything more to share.”
AI could revolutionize medicine. But if left unchecked, it could also replicate the worst parts of the tech industry: opacity, monopoly, and profit over access. Isomorphic Labs is pushing humanity toward a monumental turning point. If they succeed, they could alleviate more suffering than any other invention in history.
But to do so, they first have to convince a skeptical public that the promise is worth the unprecedented risk.
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