AI Can Now Design Drugs in Seconds; We Still Can't Tell You If They Work
That sentence should sit uncomfortably next to every headline about Alphabet’s drug discovery spinoff.On February 10, Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spinoff focused on computational drug design, released IsoDDE: its Drug Design Engine. IsoDDE is a unified in silico drug discovery system that runs protein structure prediction, ligand binding, affinity estimation, and pocket identification in concert, generating in seconds what used to take days of physics-based simulation. On the hardest molecular prediction tasks, the “Runs N’ Poses” benchmark designed to test generalization to unfamiliar proteins, IsoDDE hits a 50% success rate.
- ▪That sentence should sit uncomfortably next to every headline about Alphabet’s drug discovery spinoff.On February 10, Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spinoff focused on computational drug design, released IsoDDE: its Drug Design Engine
- ▪IsoDDE is a unified in silico drug discovery system that runs protein structure prediction, ligand binding, affinity estimation, and pocket identification in concert, generating in seconds what used to take days of physics-based simulation.
- ▪On the hardest molecular prediction tasks, the “Runs N’ Poses” benchmark designed to test generalization to unfamiliar proteins, IsoDDE hits a 50% success rate.
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AI Can Now Design Drugs in Seconds; We Still Can't Tell You If They Work.March 18, 2026 · Medicine, AIIsoDDE hits 50% on the hardest protein-ligand prediction benchmark versus 23% for AlphaFold 3 and beats the physics-based gold standard FEP+ on binding affinity with a 0.85 Pearson correlationAI-discovered drugs show 80-90% Phase I success rates versus a 40-65% historical average, but Phase II efficacy rates remain roughly 40% for both AI and traditional drugsIsomorphic’s pharma deals total over $4 billion in headline value but only $82.5 million in upfront cash, a 50:1 ratio that reflects how much pharma is betting on contingent outcomesNo AI-discovered drug has received FDA approval as of February 2026, and Isomorphic targets its first clinical candidates for late 2026No AI-discovered…
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