"Nearly two years after Google DeepMind released an updated AlphaFold3 geared at drug discovery, its biopharmaceuticals spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, announced an even more powerful artificial-intelligence model - and they're keeping it all to themselves. Isomorphic Labs, based in London, touted the capacities of its 'drug-discovery engine' - which it calls IsoDDE - in a 27-page technical report, released on 10 February."
"Similar AIs modelled after AlphaFold 3 have come close to fully matching its performance and have new capabilities. An open-source model called Boltz-2, developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and released last year, could predict the strength to which potential drugs glom onto proteins, or binding affinity. This is a key property for developing therapeutics and is usually predicted with computationally intensive physics-based methods."
Isomorphic Labs developed a proprietary AI drug-discovery engine named IsoDDE. IsoDDE achieves precise predictions of protein interactions with candidate drugs and antibody structures, demonstrating advanced capabilities for therapeutic design. The system is closed-source and its technical methods are not publicly disclosed, limiting reproducibility and broader scientific use. This contrasts with AlphaFold systems, which were released openly, and with open-source alternatives such as Boltz-2, which can predict binding affinity using different approaches. The secrecy has prompted concern among computational biologists about transparency and independent validation.
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