from Hacker News

Isomorphic Labs: Reimagining drug discovery with an AI-first approach

by XoS-490 on 11/4/21, 3:12 PM with 22 comments

• by isomorphic on 11/4/21, 7:09 PM

  > [...] 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.

• by itchyjunk on 11/4/21, 7:58 PM

  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?

• by adenadel on 11/4/21, 6:09 PM

  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?

• by pezo1919 on 11/5/21, 1:36 AM

  Wondering if this could be used to create mass destruction weapons down the line.

• by ArtWomb on 11/4/21, 4:53 PM

  > 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