DeepMind CEO Targets $100 Billion-Plus AI Drug Discovery Business With AlphaFold
First AI-designed drugs may be ready for testing in “next couple of years,” Google’s AI boss Demis Hassabis tells Bloomberg Television
Google DeepMind has released a new version of AlphaFold, a landmark tool for predicting protein structures, that puts the artificial intelligence software on a path to make breakthroughs in biology research and bolster a business that Google’s AI chief says could be worth north of $100 billion.
The AI system has the potential to revolutionize medicine and create “enormous commercial value,” for DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs, Demis Hassabis, the chief executive officer of both subsidiaries, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “I hope to do both with Isomorphic: build a multi-hundred billion dollar business — I think it has that potential — as well as be incredibly beneficial for society and humanity.’’
Isomorphic Labs, a unit of Alphabet Inc. created three years ago, was built to commercialize DeepMind’s AI for drug discovery. DeepMind first released AlphaFold in 2018, with advances in decoding the shape of proteins, a scientific problem often compared to mapping the human genome. Now in its third iteration, AlphaFold can model a range of molecular structures, including DNA and RNA, and predict how they interact with one another.