AI will design drugs in the next couple of years, says Google Deepmind boss

The chief executive of Google DeepMind has said artificial intelligence (AI) could be designing drugs in clinics within the next couple of years.

Demis Hassabis, who founded DeepMind in the UK in 2010, said AI will have a “material impact on drug discovery.”

“I think in the next couple of years we’re going to start seeing AI design drugs in the clinic,” he said, speaking to an audience of global telecoms industry players gathered at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday afternoon.

Deepmind, bought by Google in 2014, is an AI research lab and the creator of a system called Alphafold that can predict protein structures, potentially accelerating drug discovery.

“If you know the structure of a protein it also means that you could target a drug compound to bind to the surface of the relevant bit of the surface of the protein’s structure,” he explained.

In 2021, Hassabis also founded the London-based drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs, owned by Google parent company Alphabet. 

It uses AI to generate new chemical compounds that bind specifically to the exact part of the protein but no other protein, minimising side effects on the body.

“I hope that drug discovery will shrink from an average of 10 years to design one drug to maybe a matter of months to discover drugs to cure these terrible diseases,” Hassabis added.

At the start of this year, Isomorphic signed large deals with two of the biggest pharma companies in the world, Eli Lilly and Novartis, worth up to $3 billion, to work on several real-world design programmes.

It comes as an increasing number of health tech companies are attempting to use AI to solve critical medical delays. One example is Cambridge-based Nuclera, which helps accelerate drug discovery by rapidly finding the correct proteins needed to create new medicines and vaccines.

Nuclera says it can reduce the lengthy process, which can take months or even years in some cases, down to days. 

There are nearly 4,500 health tech companies in the UK which have a combined turnover of £30bn, according to the Association of British Healthtech Industries. 

A recent report said: “Responsible AI use has immense potential and its value in the health sector was widely discussed during the recent UK AI Safety Summit. Industry overwhelmingly felt that AI has the greatest potential in disease and diagnosis detection.”