AI-powered pharmaceutical company spun off from Google DeepMind (Alphabet) roughly five years ago, with Demis Hassabis as its boss. The firm's remit is to use DeepMind's protein-structure technology, AlphaFold, to find novel medicines. After several years of tooling up, as of April 2026 Isomorphic has 19 programmes spread across three main research areas: cancers, cardiovascular conditions and immunology.
Those programmes include partnerships with big pharma companies including Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson, as well as internal projects. Hassabis describes these as the first step towards a generic technology that could tackle any medical condition thrown at it, with the same rapid scaling that characterised AlphaFold's work on protein structures.
In February 2026 Isomorphic announced it was working with IsoDDE, a new proprietary version of AlphaFold—the first to be reserved for internal use rather than released publicly. IsoDDE can predict various properties of potential drugs, including their binding affinity—a measure of how strongly they link to proteins and a proxy for their eventual efficacy. According to Isomorphic's published results, IsoDDE outshines state-of-the-art open-source alternatives like Boltz-2, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. IsoDDE covers more ground than AlphaFold, as it can predict the biochemical interactions of proteins in a way its predecessor was not designed to do. Hassabis has cited both commercial value and biosecurity concerns as reasons for keeping the model behind closed doors: "If you just make that freely available, if a bad actor were to get hold of it, they could repurpose it for harmful ends."
The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.