Alphabet’s secretive drug discovery arm, Isomorphic Labs, is getting ready to start testing its AI-designed drugs in humans, Colin Murdoch, Isomorphic Labs president and Google DeepMind’s chief business officer, told Fortune.
“There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,” Murdoch said during an interview in Paris. “That’s happening right now.”
After years in development, Murdoch says human clinical trials for Isomorphic’s AI-assisted drugs are finally in sight.
“The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings,” he said. “We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close.”
The company, which was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, was born from one of DeepMind’s most celebrated breakthroughs, AlphaFold, an AI system capable of predicting protein structures with a high level of accuracy.
Interactions of AlphaFold progressed from being able to accurately predict individual protein structures to modeling how proteins interact with other molecules like DNA and drugs.
These leaps made it far more useful for drug discovery, helping researchers design medicines faster and more precisely, turning the tool into a launchpad for a much larger ambition.
“This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs,” Murdoch said of AlphaFold. “It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery.”
In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic signed major research collaborations with pharma companies Novartis and Eli Lilly.
A year later, in April 2025, Isomorphic Labs raised $600 million in its first-ever external funding round, led by Thrive Capital.
The deals are part of Isomorphic’s plan to build a “world-class drug design engine,” a system that combines machine learning researchers with pharma veterans to design new medicines faster, more cheaply, and with a higher chance of success.
As part of the deals with major pharma players, Isomorphic supports existing drug programs, but it also designs its own internal drug candidates in areas such as oncology and immunology, with the aim of eventually licensing them out after early-stage trials.
“We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programs. We develop those, put them into human clinical trials… we haven’t got that yet, but we’re making good progress,” he said.
Today, pharma companies often spend millions attempting to bring a single drug to market, sometimes with just a 10% chance of success once trials begin. Murdoch believes Isomorphic’s tech could radically improve those odds.
“We’re trying to do all these things: speed them up, reduce the cost, but also really improve the chance that we can be successful,” he says. He wants to harness AlphaFold’s technology to get to a point where researchers have 100% conviction that the drugs they are developing are going to work in human trials.
“One day we hope to be able to say — well, here’s a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease,” Murdoch said. “All powered by these amazing AI tools.”
