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Drug Discovery

AI takes center stage at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference

As the meeting kicks off, one thing is clear: Artificial intelligence firms are increasingly seeking out partnerships with Big Pharma

by Rowan Walrath
January 8, 2024

 

Photo of Westin St Francis.
Credit: Rowan Walrath/C&EN

The Westin St. Francis is the main venue for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week.

Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery firm under the Alphabet umbrella, inked two new partnerships with pharmaceutical giants, it announced Sunday. Novartis and Eli Lilly and Company will collectively pay the London-based company $82.5 million up front to use the next generation of its AlphaFold technology to find and design new small molecules. The firms are the first two pharmaceutical companies to partner with Isomorphic.

Alphabet launched Isomorphic Labs in late 2021, effectively as a commercial entity to advance AlphaFold, originally developed by DeepMind. AlphaFold is a machine-learning software that burst onto the scene a few years ago with an extraordinary ability to predict three-dimensional protein structures from their amino acid sequences.

For the Novartis and Lilly partnerships, AlphaFold will be used to discover nonprotein structures. Isomorphic says AlphaFold’s latest iteration can also be used to discover small molecules and nucleic acids.

“Cutting-edge AI technologies such as AlphaFold hold the potential to transform how we discover new drugs and accelerate our ability to deliver life-changing medicines for patients,” Novartis’s president of biomedical research, Fiona Marshall, says in a news release announcing the deal. Isomorphic will discover small molecules for three undisclosed targets for Novartis, while the Lilly partnership involves an unspecified number of targets.

Meanwhile, tech company Nvidia is diving deeper into the life sciences space. The company is expanding on a strategy it began in earnest just over a year ago: offering its drug-discovering generative AI software to biotechs and pharmaceutical companies, essentially becoming software-as-a-service for drugmakers.

Drug-discovery firms that have partnerships with Nvidia use its generative drug discovery AI cloud service, BioNeMo, to create or customize their own generative models, then offer those as a service in turn, via cloud application programming interfaces (APIs).

Nvidia already has a couple of Big Pharma partnerships, both of them announced last year. Amgen and Roche subsidiary Genentech have both incorporated BioNeMo into their workflows. Nvidia is also targeting start-ups as potential partners, like Recursion Pharmaceuticals, an AI-based drug discovery company it invested $50 million in last summer that is also using BioNeMo. Recursion will be the first company to distribute an AI model through Nvidia’s cloud APIs.

In a conference call the Thursday before the conference, Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, hinted at more large pharma partnerships to come. “You’re going to see that continue, because the pharmaceutical industry has been amassing data for decades,” Powell said. “AI is an inflection point for this industry.”

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