A startup in drug discovery targets to more than halve the time spent in finding new medicines, attracting the attention of the world"s biggest pharmaceutical companies which are looking to artificial intelligence to revolutionize the lengthy process.

Demis Hassabis, who cofounded Google DeepMind and now leads the AI drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs, said that the unit sets the goal to shorten the drug discovery stage from an average of 5 years to 2 years, reported Financial Times.

The ambitious statement came after the AI drug lab announced strategic research collaborations with two pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly and Novartis. These two partnerships could generate up to $3 billion, which is of great help for a startup that is not yet profitable.

Isomorphic Labs uses DeepMind's breakthrough in protein prediction with AlphaFold for drug discovery. At the end of October, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs unveiled a new version of AlphaFold, which can predict the structure of almost any molecule in the Protein Data Bank (PDB), often with atomic accuracy - an important step in understanding complex biological mechanisms in cells.

The new model goes beyond proteins and covers a wide range of biologically relevant molecules such as ligands and nucleic acids.  It outperforms conventional methods in predicting protein-ligand interactions by about 20%, and can also predict new proteins that have not yet been structurally characterized. This could have a significant impact on drug discovery.

Including clinical trials, it often takes up to a decade to discover and develop a new drug, costing on average about $2.7 billion, according to research by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. 

Large drugmakers, under pressure to fill their pipelines with new potential medicines while existing ones face patent cliffs, when they face far cheaper generic competition, are eager for new ways to shorten the process. As healthcare systems around the world put pressure on drug prices, pharma companies are also looking for ways to cut costs in research and development.

Isomorphic"s deals come as Google faces fierce competition in the development of AI software from the likes of Microsoft-backed OpenAI and smaller start-ups such as Anthropic and Cohere. 

As the top dog in the race, OpenAI"s revenue is said to surpass $1.6 billion in 2023. This figure represents a staggering year-over-year (YoY) increase of 700%, or eight times, soaring from the $200 million recorded in 2022.

However, the multi-billion deals inked by Isomorphic show that AI in medicine could be more lucrative than just the large language model (LLM).$GOOGL(GOOGL) $MSFT(MSFT)