Alphabet’s drug discovery unit Isomorphic Labs is preparing to test its AI-designed medicines in humans for the first time, its president has confirmed.
Colin Murdoch, president of Isomorphic Labs and chief business officer at Google DeepMind, said clinical trials were “very close” following years of development.
Murdoch told Fortune during an interview in Paris: “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.”
Isomorphic Labs was spun out of DeepMind in 2021, based on its work with AlphaFold – an artificial intelligence system capable of predicting protein structures with high accuracy.
Proteins are molecules in the body that carry out essential functions, and their three-dimensional shape determines how they behave.
AlphaFold has since progressed from predicting individual structures to modelling how proteins interact with other molecules, such as DNA and drugs.
Murdoch said: “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.”
In 2024, the same year it released AlphaFold 3, Isomorphic Labs signed major research collaborations with pharmaceutical companies Novartis and Eli Lilly.
It supports existing drug programmes as well as developing its own internal candidates in areas including oncology and immunology, with the aim of eventually licensing them after early-stage trials.
“This was the inspiration for Isomorphic Labs,” Murdoch said, referring to AlphaFold.
“It really demonstrates that we could do something very foundational in AI that could help unlock drug discovery.”
In April 2025, the company raised US$600m in its first external funding round, led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital.
Isomorphic says it is building a “world-class drug design engine” by combining machine learning researchers with pharmaceutical industry veterans to design new medicines faster, more cost-effectively, and with a higher chance of success.
Bringing a new medicine to market can take years and cost hundreds of millions, with success rates after clinical trials starting as low as 10 per cent.
Murdoch believes the company’s technology could significantly improve those odds.
He said: “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.
“We identify an unmet need, and we start our own drug design programmes.
“We develop those, put them into human clinical trials… we haven’t got that yet, but we’re making good progress,” Murdoch said.
Looking ahead, he envisions a future where drug discovery could become highly automated, powered by tools like AlphaFold.
He said: “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.
“All powered by these amazing AI tools.”
