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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year-old drug discovery startup owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company, will have an AI-designed drug in trials by the end of this year, says its founder Sir Demis Hassabis.
“We're looking at oncology, cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, all the big disease areas, and I think by the end of this year, we'll have our first drug,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times in World Economics. Forum.
“It usually takes five to 10 years to[discover]one drug. Maybe we can speed that up 10 times, which would be an amazing revolution in human health.” HassabisWho won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Becker last October.
symmetric It was spun off from artificial intelligence research company Google DeepMind in 2021, but remains a wholly-owned subsidiary of its parent company Alphabet. The startup's potential has attracted major pharma partners, who are keen to cut expenses and boost the efficiency of the costly drug development process.
Hassabis previously told the Financial Times that his team is working on six drug development programs with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is also CEO of Google DeepMind, said the search giant's prototype of an AI assistant, known as Project Astra, will likely be released to consumers later this year. He described the near future, in three years' time, when there will be “billions” of AI agents, “negotiating with each other on behalf of the vendor and the customer,” and said that would require rethinking the web itself.
He also called for more caution and coordination between the leadership Artificial intelligence developers Competition to build artificial general intelligence. He warned that technology could threaten human civilization if it gets out of control or is reused by “bad actors…” . . for malicious purposes.”
Google DeepMind's ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, or “a system capable of exhibiting all the cognitive abilities that humans have,” according to Hassabis, who said that despite the “hype” on social media about its proximity, the A.I. The real year was still five to 10 years away.
“If there is something possible and valuable to do, people will do it,” Hassabis said. “We're past that point now with AI, you can't put the genie back in the bottle…so we have to try and make sure we channel that out into the world in as safe a way as possible.
