Using ChatGPT for medical education: the technical perspective

DeepMind's New Research Restrictions Threaten AI Innovation, Warns Iris.ai CEO

Google DeepMind's reported clampdown on sharing research will stifle AI innovation, warns the CEO of Iris.Ai, one of Europe's leading startups in the space.

The UK-based lab has tightened its rules on releasing AI studies, the Financial Times reported this week. Citing seven current and former DeepMind scientists, the newspaper said the company has introduced stricter vetting and additional bureaucracy, making it harder to publish research. The changes aim to protect the company's edge in AI, the sources said.

Acquired by Google in 2014, DeepMind has long been a leader in computer science breakthroughs. In recent years, however, the lab has faced increasing competition from the likes of OpenAI and DeepSeek. Under growing pressure to stay ahead, the company is reportedly erecting new barriers around its innovations and reputation.

The new constraints have alarmed Anita Schjøll Abildgaard, co-founder and CEO of Iris.Ai, a Norwegian startup developing an AI-powered engine for science. She fears DeepMind's restrictions will hinder technological advances.

"DeepMind's decision marks the end of an era of openness and collaboration in AI research," she said.

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On first impression, the changes at DeepMind may appear beneficial for other AI labs. The company's pioneering innovations and enormous citation counts have overshadowed other researchers in the field, who could now receive a larger share of the spotlight. But Abildgaard warns the drawbacks will far outweigh the benefits.

"Researchers across industries will have less access to DeepMind's undoubtedly impressive work," she said.

She pointed to the example of DeepMind's AlphaFold, a system that predicts protein structure with remarkable accuracy. The software has been hailed as a solution to one of biology's biggest mysteries, with potential to fuel countless advances, from discovering new drugs to tackling climate change.

"It's hard to imagine projects of this importance being released so readily under this new diktat," Abildgaard said.

The impacts, she warned, could be severe. In response, she urged AI companies to strengthen their commitment to openness.

"Europe, in particular, has one of the most fertile open-source research communities in the world," she said. "As DeepMind looks inwards, smaller research communities can differentiate themselves from the American giants by embracing collaboration."

Europe's AI sector features prominently in the agenda for TNW Conference, which takes place on June 19-20 in Amsterdam. Tickets for the event are now on sale. Use the code TNWXMEDIA2025 at the check-out to get 30% off the price tag.

Alphabet's DeepMind Forms AI Drug Discovery Unit Isomorphic Labs

Google parent Alphabet has drawn on its DeepMind artificial intelligence division to form a drug discovery unit that it calls Isomorphic Labs.

The UK-registered company will be able to tap into DeepMind's AI-powered AlphaFold engine that last year became the first to solve the tricky problem of predicting protein folding, but will operate separately.

It has since been used to model the 3D structure of nearly all the 20,000 or so proteins expressed by the human genome, and earlier this year a new version – AlphaFold2 – was made freely available to researchers around the world.

That raised the hope that it could be used accelerate research into how diseases affect the body, and develop new medicines that can latch onto troublesome proteins effectively.

[caption id="attachment_82423" align="alignright" width="139"] Demis Hassabis[/caption]

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's founder and chief executive, has taken the same roles at Isomorphic Labs on an interim basis, saying in a blog post that the new company will "reimagine the entire drug discovery process from the ground up with an AI-first approach."

He said the dual role will help facilitate collaboration between the two companies and help "set out the strategy, vision and culture" of Isomorphic Labs, while launching a recruitment drive to find expertise in AI, biology, medicinal chemistry, biophysics, and engineering. It also wants to forge alliances with pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

"We believe that the foundational use of cutting edge computational and AI methods can help scientists take their work to the next level, and massively accelerate the drug discovery process," said Hassabis.

In July, DeepMind said that around one third of proteins in the AlphaFold2 database – developed with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) – were considered to be detailed and precise enough to allow drug design.

The AI has also been used to model hundreds of thousands of proteins from other species, including 20 model organisms used in research like the mouse, nematode worm and fruit fly, and human pathogens like the malaria parasite.

AlphaFold2 is already being used by partners researching neglected diseases like leishmaniasis and Chaga's disease, studying antibiotic resistance, recycling single-use plastics, and understanding the biology of the COVID-19 virus SARS-CoV-2.

https://twitter.Com/demishassabis/status/1456283988138594307

Isomorphic Labs launches into an already well-populated drug discovery category, with many large drugmakers exploring the technology along with a host of specialist players like Exscientia, Insilico Medicine, Deep Genomics, Abcellera, and Valence Discovery.

There's not much information yet about Isomorphic Labs' strategy, other than a general statement that the company will build "a computational platform to understand biological systems from first principles to discover new ways to treat disease."

Hassabis acknowledges the challenge facing AI drug discovery companies in his comments, noting that "biology is likely far too complex and messy to ever be encapsulated as a simple set of neat mathematical equations."

He added however that "just as mathematics turned out to be the right description language for physics, biology may turn out to be the perfect type of regime for the application of AI."

Alphabet's Isomorphic Raises $600m For AI Drug Discovery

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Isomorphic Labs

Isomorphic Labs founder and CEO Sir Demis Hassabis

Isomorphic Labs has raised a whopping $600 million to refine its artificial intelligence-powered drug discovery engine, advance its pipeline, and expand its headcount in its first external funding round.

The start-up – which has emerged from Google parent Alphabet's DeepMind project and is led by DeepMind founder Sir Demis Hassabis – said the financing was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from GV, as well as Alphabet.

Isomorphic's technology platform has already generated a number of AI models that are being applied to the discovery of new medicines, and it already counts Eli Lilly and Novartis among pharma groups that are tapping into its expertise.

The London, UK-based company was set up in 2021 to develop DeepMind's AlphaFold engine that, in 2020, became the first to solve the tricky problem of predicting protein folding, unlocking new ways to research how diseases affect the body and develop new medicines that can modify the activity of disease-related proteins.

Now in its third iteration, the model can predict the structure and relationships not only of proteins, but "all of life's molecules," according to Isomorphic, which has used it and other technologies to establish a drug discovery portfolio that includes in-house candidates for cancer and immunological diseases.

"We're excited to bring together a top-tier investor group with deep AI and life sciences expertise as we aim to transform this industry through an interdisciplinary approach," said Hassabis.

"This funding will further turbocharge the development of our next-generation AI drug design engine, help us advance our own programmes into clinical development, and is a significant step forward towards our mission of one day solving all disease with the help of AI," he added.

Lilly and Novartis have collectively pledged almost $3 billion to their partnerships with Isomorphic signed last year, which included more than $80 million upfront, and in February the company announced that Novartis had expanded their alliance, adding three additional research programmes "on the same financial terms as the original agreement."

Commenting on the financing round, Thrive founder and chief executive Joshua Kushner said that Isomorphic "has earned a rare position to define a new age of drug discovery and design, and we are deeply inspired by their mission and the extraordinary progress they have made to date."

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