In conversation with Max Jaderberg: Isomorphic Labs’ incoming President
As Max Jaderberg prepares to take on the role of President, starting in January 2026, we sat down with him to hear more about his journey, the progress we’ve made so far, and the vision he has as we enter this exciting new chapter.
Max, thanks for taking the time to share more with us! You’ve been at Isomorphic Labs from the very beginning as a founding member of the team. Can you share what brought you to Isomorphic Labs?
I’ve spent most of my career at the frontier of AI and machine learning; creating the methods and building the applications that are now beginning to produce so much value in our world. However, like any great new technology I believe we have a responsibility to make sure we point it at the most important problems for humanity, to make sure it really has an impact on the big, real-world problems we face.
I grew up in a very entrepreneurial and medical household, with my parents and grandparents owning businesses and working in medicine, pharma, and drug development. As a result, when I started to think about all the different areas that the core AI and machine learning algorithms that I’d been working on could be applied to, I couldn’t help but see the potential value AI held for drug discovery and design. It really stood out as an exciting and important opportunity to make a difference.
So, when Demis invited me to be part of the founding team of Isomorphic Labs, it was a no-brainer decision for me. I’ve been all-in since.
What have you been most proud of so far in your time at Iso?
When we were planning what to build with AI at the start of the company, what we were talking about felt very ‘sci-fi’, but now, sitting here four years later, we’ve actually made a huge part of that reality with our drug design engine. For example, whilst it was sci-fi to think at the beginning that we would have push-button designs of molecules that would wow chemists, this is now something commonplace internally, with many examples of finding completely novel chemical matter that leads to functional biological response, for some of the industry’s hardest challenges. It’s changed the way our drug designers work and understand biology, I’m really proud of that.
And like all frontier science and engineering, when you are able to understand and manipulate the world in a fundamentally new way – like we are able to do now with our biomolecular world – this opens up new doors, challenges, possibilities for where our drug design engine and medicines can go next. I love that we never stand still in pushing to the next frontier at Iso.
You've always been a builder – from robotics as a kid to creating businesses and technology at DeepMind before joining the founding team at Iso. What will your approach be as the incoming President to building and scaling at Isomorphic Labs?
I've been part of the development of the overarching mission and strategy for Isomorphic Labs with Demis, Colin and the rest of the executive leadership team since the company was founded. It’s been really exciting to see the initial strategy turn into reality and work with the most amazing colleagues across many different disciplines to get to where we are today. My focus as President will be on ensuring the company is able to continue to deliver against the ambitious strategy towards our big mission. This will mean progressing our internal and partnership programmes towards the clinic, scaling and refining new generations of our drug design engine, all the while ensuring we have the space to advance the fundamental science and engineering needed to realise the full potential of what AI can bring to drug design.
To help us build and scale to where we want to go, I’ll take a holistic approach; we have to bring our domain experts together, with the right resources – like data and compute – and with the support from our strong partners and investors. This has always been the key to Iso’s growth and progress so far.
In the months ahead, I’ll be getting stuck into answering the complex questions the team is grappling with about how we prioritise our efforts (as the possible exciting things to work on keep multiplying!), what we need to do to set ourselves up for scaling the impact of our unified drug design engine, and how we build in flexibility to make the most of new opportunities as they emerge.
What role do partners and collaborators have to play in our work at Isomorphic Labs?
Partners bring us unique capabilities and the world’s hardest problems, keeping us ambitious, honest, and pushing at the forefront of science.
It's been amazing to see the progress across our collaborations with Novartis and Lilly, we’re all very happy with how our projects are progressing. We’ve had the privilege of learning from their great science and their great teams. And our wider collaborations, such as with the UK BioBank or the OpenBind Consortium, help us join forces with others in the industry to keep driving the field forward.
Finally, looking ahead, what excites you most about the next chapter for Isomorphic Labs?
I think it’s important to remember, we have a very ambitious mission – to one day solve all disease – and we believe that because AI is such a fundamental new technology to help us forward, and is only going to be getting stronger. But that mission isn’t going to happen overnight, and it’s something that is so huge that it isn’t going to happen if we work in isolation, we will have to work together as an entire industry to achieve the heights of what we believe is possible.
It requires both our own scientific breakthroughs, and a commitment to bringing many others along with us for the journey. I’m definitely excited and proud to lead Isomorphic Labs into this next phase of scale and immense impact.
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