Matt WolfeFutureTools.io · Founder of Future Tools | Host of Next Wave Podcast

We'll Cure Diseases in a Months with AI

25 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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Demis Hassabis describes spinning out Isomorphic Labs to rethink drug discovery with AI, aiming to shorten the usual ~decade development timeline to months or even weeks. He argues this is plausible by analogy to AlphaFold — which transformed protein structure prediction in the last five to six years from years-long experimental work to seconds-long computational predictions — and expresses optimism about curing many diseases faster.

Questions this video answers

Isomorphic Labs.

Around a decade.

AlphaFold; about five to six years ago.

A matter of months, maybe even weeks.

Chapters

We spun out a company called Isomorphic Labs to do drug discovery, rethink the sort of the whole drug discovery process from first principles with AI. And normally, you know, it takes the rule of thumb is around a decade for a drug to be to go from sort of identifying why a disease is being caused to actually coming up with a cure for it and then finally being available to patients. It's a very laborious, very hard, painstaking and expensive process and I would love to be able to speed that up to a matter of months, maybe even weeks, one day and cure hundreds of diseases like that. And I think that's potentially in reach. It sounds maybe a bit science fiction like today, but that's what protein structure prediction was like, you know, five, six years ago, before we came up with AlphaFold and used to take years to find, painstakingly with experimental techniques, the structure of one protein. And now we can do it in a matter of seconds with these computational methods. So I think that sort of potential is there and it's really exciting to try and make that happen.