New Delhi: AI might soon take a seat in the frontlines of modern medicine. Google DeepMind’s spin-off company Isomorphic Labs says it’s almost ready to begin testing its AI-designed drugs on real people. This could be a major shift in how treatments are discovered and developed; faster, cheaper, and possibly more accurate.
Colin Murdoch, President of Isomorphic Labs and Chief Business Officer at DeepMind, told Fortune during an interview in Paris that human trials are right around the corner. “There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. That’s happening right now,” he said.
AlphaFold behind the science
Isomorphic Labs was created in 2021 out of the progress made with DeepMind’s AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict the structure of proteins. In simple words, it helps researchers understand how different proteins fold and interact with each other and with molecules like DNA or medicines. That ability is now being pushed further to design completely new drugs.
“This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs,” Murdoch said. “It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery.”
What happens next
The company has already partnered with global pharma players like Novartis and Eli Lilly. After the launch of AlphaFold 3 in 2024, it raised nearly ₹5,200 crore ($600 million) in funding led by Thrive Capital in April 2025. The team is now building what they call a world-class drug design engine.
Murdoch explained, “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.”
Faster drug creation, better success rate?
Traditional drug development is slow, expensive, and often unsuccessful. On average, only 10 out of 100 drugs that go through trials actually make it to the market. The aim at Isomorphic Labs is to boost these odds using AI.
“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,” Murdoch said. One of his boldest hopes? A future where “here’s a disease, and then click a button and out pops the design for a drug to address that disease.”
Trials on the horizon
While exact dates are still unclear, the company has started hiring more people and is preparing for the next step, human testing. “The next big milestone is actually going out to clinical trials, starting to put these things into human beings. We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close,” Murdoch added.
Isomorphic Labs has not yet revealed which diseases or drug candidates will be tested first. But early hints suggest areas like oncology and immunology are top of the list.