Another huge funding round for the currently blazing topic of AI-enabled drug discovery: Google D...

Another huge funding round for the currently blazing topic of AI-enabled drug discovery: Google DeepMind's spin-off Isomorphic Labs has just raised a whopping $600M of Thrive Capital and GV (Google Ventures).

To be fair, having developed the Nobel-prize winning alpha-fold technology that predicts how protein are actually structured in 3D gives you a bit of an unfair advantage.

The company makes some the very modest statement on their website to "solve all disease", but is rather cryptic on what technology is being used beyond the latest iteration of Alpha-fold, and using "AI models capable of working across multiple therapeutic areas and drug modalities".

My former colleagues at Novartis as well as the folks from Eli Lilly and Company are already partnered with Isomorphic.

This huge round follows last year's mega round of Xaira Therapeutics that has raised an even bigger $1bn. Beyond these mega-rounds, there are obviously dozens of other interesting players in this area that have raised smaller amounts.

With investors clearly betting big on the red-hot promise of AI-driven biotech, the race is on not only for groundbreaking technology but also for demonstrating tangible clinical results.

It'll be fascinating if bigger is truly better in this rapidly emerging space.

https://lnkd.in/efd25diA