"In the high-stakes world of modern medicine, finding a cure should be mathematically impossible. Researchers estimate there are 10^60 possible chemical compounds-or 10 to the 60th power, a number greater than the stars in the observable universe-yet only a microscopic fraction will ever become viable medicines. Now, a convergence of big pharma legacy and venture capital investment is betting billions that artificial intelligence can finally decode this infinite complexity."
""No one would visualize designing an airplane today by hand, nor would you want to fly an airplane designed by hand," Thrive Capital partner Vince Hankes told Fortune's Allie Garfinkle. "But all of our drugs are designed like that." In the future, he predicted, drugs should all be designed "with robust software and intelligence and simulation, just like we design airplanes today.""
"The latest financing push surrounding this sector stems from the success of AlphaFold 2, an AI system that solved the "protein folding problem" by predicting 3D protein structures from DNA sequences. This breakthrough, which earned Isomorphic founder Demis Hassabis a Nobel Prize in 2024, offered the first seismic proof that AI could compress biological research processes that once took years into mere minutes."
There are an estimated 10^60 possible chemical compounds, far more than stars in the observable universe, yet only a microscopic fraction will become viable medicines. A convergence of big pharma legacy and venture capital investment is committing billions to apply artificial intelligence to drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs, spun out of Alphabet, secured a $600 million Series A in March 2025 led by Thrive Capital with participation from Google Ventures. Investors are shifting to treat biology as an engineering problem rather than a game of chance. AlphaFold 2 solved the protein folding problem and earned Demis Hassabis a Nobel Prize in 2024. Traditional drug discovery typically takes over a decade, costs more than $2 billion, and suffers a roughly 90% failure rate.
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