A March of “Big Tech” Corporations Into Pharmaceutical Industry
In November 2021, the parent company of Google, Alphabet, Inc., announced the launch of a new commercial subsidiary in the biomedical space -- Isomorphic Labs. Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, will serve also as a temporary CEO of the newly formed company to ensure close collaboration between the two organizations, and the creation of a strong development strategy.
As Hassabis wrote in his blog post, the name of the company “isomorphic” reflects his belief that biological systems and information science can, in principle, be sharing some common underlying structure -- a situation described by mathematicians as an isomorphic mapping between two systems or sets of data.
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, an isomorphism preserves some structural aspect of a set or mathematical group, so it is often used to map a complicated set (in our case -- biology) onto a simpler or better-known set (information models) in order to establish the original set’s properties.
Unsurprisingly, the news about the launch of Isomorphic Labs immediately generated a “tsunami” in the media space, as with most announcements from Alphabet/Google. It yet remains to be seen how Isomorphic Labs is going to contribute to the industry as they have not announced much since the foundation. But it brings us to a discussion of a more general trend in the pharmaceutical space -- it gets crowded with traditionally “non-pharmaceutical” technology corporations, like Google.
Topics: Industry Trends
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