[HN Gopher] Isomorphic Labs: Reimagining drug discovery with an ...
___________________________________________________________________
Isomorphic Labs: Reimagining drug discovery with an AI-first
approach
Author : XoS-490
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-11-04 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.isomorphiclabs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.isomorphiclabs.com)
| [deleted]
| XoS-490 wrote:
| > Reimagining the entire drug discovery process with an AI-first
| approach
| itchyjunk wrote:
| Was alalphafold2 that big of a landmark in application sense? I
| realize the protein folding problem is a hard and important one.
| But I didn't realize this result had immediate practical
| application. Will they just be consulting pharmas? Patienting
| proteins and such?
| zippy5 wrote:
| I think it could be Nobel Prize worthy. Protein's structure
| often determines its effect as a catalyst. So to map the DNA to
| the 2nd order outcomes seems like it could be the missing
| ingredient to controlling the properties of cells.
|
| Personally I'm hoping that someone smarter than me figures out
| how to displace existing catalysts like platinum and palladium.
| Seems like it could be a pretty penny and some positive
| environmental impact to boot.
| ArtWomb wrote:
| > At its most fundamental level, I think biology can be thought
| of as an information processing system, albeit an extraordinarily
| complex and dynamic one. Taking this perspective implies there
| may be a common underlying structure between biology and
| information science - an isomorphic mapping between the two -
| hence the name of the company
| adenadel wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why this should be an entirely new
| company (subsidiary) rather than folding DeepMind's capabilities
| into Verily and Calico? Are these different groups siloed from
| one another within Google?
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| Calico seems to be focused on combating aging.
| gotmedium wrote:
| I believe there is a lot of internal politics and dynamics
| playing here.
|
| If you are Demis Hassabis and want to lead this new initiative:
|
| - Why would you want to report to the CEO of another subsidiary
| instead of spinning-off another entity within the Alphabet
| conglomerate?
|
| - You can let the DeepMind team focus in their original areas
| of expertise.
|
| - You will have a new (and $$$$) budget to hire computational
| biology PhDs
|
| - With the new entity, you can fail a lot and not make Verily
| and Calico look bad (inside and out XYZ)
|
| If you are Verily and/or Calico:
|
| - You don't want a newcomer bring the exciting new projects and
| ruin your projects, budgets, initiatives
|
| - [very speculative] You don't like Hassabis' progress (or is
| envy of)
|
| - You think this new project will fail and don't this under
| your umbrella
| dekhn wrote:
| precisely this
| Jabbles wrote:
| Does anyone have a good idea what Verily or Calico actually
| do, or have done?
| dekhn wrote:
| Verily has done a bunch of things, only a few of them
| really stuck around. Project Baseline (which pivoted from
| clinical to covid), Debug, a few spinoffs with other drug
| companies. Most stuff revolves around physical objects with
| sensors, intended for a mixture of lab and clinical
| settings. They make some software, for example Terra (a
| scientific research platform mostly for
| genomics/bioinformatics).
|
| Calico does basic life science research and publishes it,
| https://calicolabs.com/publications and also has private
| partnerships. They are pretty secretive so it's hard to
| know but most of the research is about using mouse models
| to understand fundamental details of aging biology, the
| long game being to make Larry Page live forever.
| [deleted]
| isomorphic wrote:
| > [...] there may be a common underlying structure between
| biology and information science - an _isomorphic_ mapping between
| the two - hence the name of the company. Biology is likely far
| too complex and messy to ever be encapsulated as a simple set of
| neat mathematical equations.
|
| ...uses a neatly-defined mathematical term to name the company,
| then rejects the idea of neat mathematics in practice.
| andbberger wrote:
| using arbitrary function approximators no less. everything can
| be isomorphic if you stir the linear algebra pot for long
| enough!
| reidjs wrote:
| Do you disagree with that? I think the point they're making is
| perfectly reasonable
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-04 23:01 UTC)