Isomorphic Labs is not known to the general public. But this subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has big ambitions: “improve the way drugs are discovered”and even open the era of “digital biology”, explains its technical director, Sergei Yakneen. For this, the young company, created at the end of 2021, intends to rely on “one of the most significant research projects” from DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary: AlphaFold 2, which, in mid-2021, successfully modeled the 200 million known proteins in 3D.
DeepMind was already known for having beaten the world go champion with AlphaGo, but this new publication has “shook the scientific world”recalls Mr. Yakneen, who, at the time, was working on using AI to improve cancer diagnosis at the Swiss company Sophia Genetics. “Before AlphaFold, it took a doctoral student four or five years to determine the structure of just one of them”insists the computer scientist.
Mr. Yakneen, born in Soviet Siberia, but having emigrated to Canada as a teenager with his family, today divides his time between the two offices of Isomorphic Labs, in Lausanne, Switzerland, and London, Kingdom -Uni, in a building next to DeepMind headquarters. A sign of the importance of the project, its general director is Demis Hassabis, founder of DeepMind and now director of all of the digital giant’s AI research teams, grouped together in the Google DeepMind entity. “He is passionate about medicine”said Mr. Yakneen.
Predict the shapes of molecules, their toxicity
What do the company’s hundred employees actually do? “Our thesis is that we can represent biology digitally. That we can build models that will help us understand the systems of life and, then, predict and draw elements in silico, in a computer, rather than using traditional laboratory experiment techniques, by chemists and biologists », explains Mr. Yakneen, who studied in Canada with a luminary in AI, Geoffrey Hinton. For this, AlphaFold is not “only one piece of a much larger puzzle”, he explains. Isomorphic Labs therefore works to create models that replicate the laws of chemistry, physics or biology, in order to try to predict the shapes of molecules, their interactions, their toxicity, etc.
This “incredibly difficult task” is far from being completed, but the company is pleased to have, in October 2023, published a new version of AlphaFold, integrating, in addition to proteins, elements on nucleic acids, DNA or “small molecules” called ligands. The aim is not only to accelerate research into treatments and lower their costs, but to “do new things”for example to fight against incurable or rare diseases, specifies Mr. Yakneen.
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