STAT+: With $40 million, former DeepMind employees launch startup ‘laser-focused’ on AI protein design
Former DeepMind employees raise $40 million to launch London-based startup 'laser-focused' on AI protein design.
Where is DeepMind’s AI protein design spinout? The Alphabet-owned AI company took the biology world by storm in 2020 with AlphaFold2, the protein structure prediction AI platform that “solved” a decades-old biology problem. In 2021, the company spun out Isomorphic Labs, an AI drug discovery company. But Isomorphic’s initial focus is on small-molecule drug discovery, with protein-based drugs remaining a distant twinkle in the company’s eye.
Watching the Isomorphic spinout was frustrating for Simon Kohl. He was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that developed Alphafold2, and afterward worked on DeepMind’s protein design team for two years. Isomorphic has a broad vision and is going after many things at once, he told STAT, and he felt a “laser-focused entity” focused on protein design would do a better job.
“I loved working at DeepMind. It’s such a fantastic place and I really enjoyed the time on the AlphaFold team, but really did feel to maximize impact in [protein design], it required its own entity,” said Kohl.
