AI-developed drug will be in trials by year-end, says Google’s Hassabis

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Isomorphic Labs, the four-year-old drug discovery start-up owned by Google parent Alphabet, will be in an artificial intelligence-designed drug trial by the end of this year, its founder Sir Demis Hassabis said.

“We’re looking at oncology, cardiovascular, neurodegeneration, all the big disease areas, and I think we’ll have our first drug by the end of this year,” he told the Financial Times in World Economic said in an interview. forum.

“It usually takes five to 10 years on average [to discover] a drug And maybe we can accelerate 10 times, which will be an incredible revolution in human health,” said you will laughwho received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October along with his colleague John Jumper and biochemist David Baker.

isomorphic Google’s AI research arm Google DeepMind was spun off in 2021, but remains a wholly owned subsidiary of its parent company, Alphabet. The potential of the start-up has attracted large pharmaceutical partners, who are keen to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the expensive drug development process.

Hassabis previously told the FT that his team was working on six drug development programs with Eli Lilly and Novartis.

In a wide-ranging interview, Hassabis, who is chief executive of Google DeepMind, said the search giant’s prototype of an AI assistant, known as Project Astra, will likely roll out to customers later this year. He described a near future, within three years, when there will be “billions” of AI agents, “negotiating with each other on behalf of sellers and customers” and said it is the web itself that needs to be rethought.

He called for more vigilance and coordination among the leaders AI developers Competition to build artificial general intelligence. He warned that the technology could threaten human civilization if it gets out of control or is “repurposed by bad actors . . . for harmful ends.”

Google DeepMind’s ultimate goal is to create artificial general intelligence, or “a system capable of displaying all human cognitive abilities,” according to Hassabis, who said that despite social media “hype” it was close, true AGI was still five to 10 years away. away

“If something is possible and worth doing, people will do it,” Hassabis said. “We’re past that point with AI now, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. . . So we have to try and make sure to steward it out into the world in as safe a way as possible.”