- Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg announced on April 16, 2026 that the UK-based AI drug discovery company is “gearing up to go into the clinic” with molecules designed by its AI platform.
- The company’s IsoDDE drug-design engine, released in early 2026, claims in a technical paper to more than double the predictive accuracy of AlphaFold 3.
- Isomorphic Labs has active partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis and raised $600 million in 2025 to fund clinical development.
- The timeline is later than CEO Demis Hassabis’s 2025 projection that AI-designed drugs would enter trials before year’s end.
What Happened
Isomorphic Labs, the UK-based drug discovery company spun out of Google DeepMind in 2021, said it is preparing to enter human clinical trials with drug candidates generated by its AI platform. President Max Jaderberg made the announcement on April 16 at WIRED Health in London, stating the company is “gearing up to go into the clinic” and calling the pending trials “a very exciting moment as we go into clinical trials and start seeing the efficacy of these molecules.” Jaderberg did not disclose which specific drug candidates are advancing or name a trial start date.
The announcement marks a delay from the company’s stated timeline. In 2025, CEO Demis Hassabis publicly projected that Isomorphic Labs would have AI-designed drugs in clinical trials before the end of that year.
Why It Matters
Isomorphic Labs is among the highest-profile efforts to advance a drug whose molecular structure was proposed by an AI system — rather than identified through conventional high-throughput screening or medicinal chemistry — into human testing. The company’s core technology, DeepMind’s AlphaFold, earned Hassabis and co-developer John Jumper the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024; the Nobel committee cited applications including improved understanding of antibiotic resistance and the design of enzymes capable of degrading plastic.
Clinical trials represent the threshold that preclinical AI drug discovery has yet to broadly clear. The historical failure rate for drug candidates entering Phase I trials exceeds 80 percent across all therapeutic modalities, and AI-designed molecules have not yet accumulated sufficient trial data to establish a comparative failure rate.
Technical Details
Isomorphic Labs’ discovery pipeline is built on AlphaFold 3, released in 2024. Unlike earlier versions of AlphaFold, which focused on single-protein structure prediction, AlphaFold 3 models interactions between proteins and other biologically significant molecules — including DNA, RNA, and small-molecule drug candidates — predicting both binding affinity to a target protein and potential off-target interactions, two variables central to estimating efficacy and safety before human testing.
In early 2026, Isomorphic Labs published a technical paper introducing IsoDDE, a proprietary drug-design engine the company claims more than doubles the predictive accuracy of AlphaFold 3. Jaderberg attributed the improvement to deeper molecular-level modeling: “We’ve engineered them to be very, very potent. You can take them at a much lower dose, and they’ll have lower side effects, off target effects.” The IsoDDE technical paper has not been independently peer-reviewed, and these remain company claims.
AlphaFold has to date predicted the structures of approximately 200 million known proteins and has been used by more than 2 million researchers across 190 countries since the open-source release of AlphaFold 2 in 2021.
Who’s Affected
Pharmaceutical partners Eli Lilly and Novartis both have active AI drug discovery collaborations with Isomorphic Labs; trial results will directly inform the scope and continuity of those agreements. Jaderberg identified oncology and immunology as the two therapeutic areas currently in the company’s pipeline, placing the eventual clinical data most immediately before researchers and patients in those disease areas.
Academic researchers who use AlphaFold for structural biology — more than 2 million users to date — and AI drug discovery companies pursuing comparable structure-based design approaches will also track Isomorphic’s first human data as a sector-level benchmark.
What’s Next
Isomorphic Labs spent 2025 assembling a clinical development team, appointing a chief medical officer, and closing a $600 million first external funding round to underwrite the transition from preclinical research to human studies. Jaderberg restated the company’s stated mission at WIRED Health: “We really mean it. We say it with a straight face, because we believe this should be possible.”
Jaderberg provided no trial start date or candidate names at WIRED Health. Formal trial initiation would typically be preceded by an Investigational New Drug application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or equivalent filings with the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency — submissions that become publicly accessible once filed.
