© 2022 ISOMORPHIC LABS
Today is International Women’s Day, and with it, the familiar chorus of questioning voices asking how to get more women and girls interested in STEM.
Encouraging women in science is something close to my heart, but during my whole career as a chemist, I’ve always felt supported by all my colleagues, regardless of gender. It has always been possible to make science a field where women can be both groundbreaking and glass-ceiling-breaking.
I wanted to share my career story in the hopes that it might inspire others - and make clear that you shouldn’t believe anyone who tells you it is difficult to hire brilliant women in STEM: we’ve always been here, and there are more of us with each passing year.
Bridging different perspectives on drug discovery
I did my undergrad through to PhD at Imperial College London and afterwards joined the James Black Foundation, only a few weeks before Jim won the Nobel prize for pioneering strategies for rational drug design. I began as a laboratory-based scientist making molecules, and was part of a number of exciting projects, like developing a new way to understand and represent molecules, capturing the electrostatic properties of molecules beyond the 2D models of the past.
Over the years, my interests shifted to what we were going to make next, rather than how we were going to make it. Moving to work with researchers at Imperial College to identify drug discovery projects felt like a natural next step. What I didn’t anticipate is how the role would completely change my view of the drug discovery process and how badly it needed to change.
My role at Imperial involved working with scientists and medics, bridging the gap between the two; and I came to appreciate that it was quite the gap. A scientist’s point of view favours discovery – science for science’s sake. My conversations with doctors, however, painted a vivid picture of people in need: whether it be patients who suffer from acute or chronic diseases, or families who are facing the imminent loss of a loved one.
In both cases, doctors would return to the same exasperated conclusion: lives could be saved and improved if drugs were developed faster. It completely shifted the urgency and speed of revolutionising the drug discovery process for me. Something needed to be done differently and I recognised my experience could be put to use to drive change.
The importance of genuine collaboration
I was looking for an opportunity to apply that sense of urgency. After leaving Imperial, I worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a consultant, helping chemists and biologists talk to each other. The most exciting part of the job was how internationally focussed it was. We developed consortiums and provided the tools to connect scientists working on problems in California with scientists working on the same problem in Cameroon.
In science, you never work in isolation - it’s important to test ideas with your peers and get regular feedback from them. But there was something even more enriching about forming partnerships among a wide range of people. For me, it really reinforced the belief that collaboration is key in the fields of chemistry and drug discovery: it's the only way we can get access to more data, more experiments, and more ideas.
In drug discovery, you cannot make compromises on quality - and if we are really going to reimagine the process by which we discover drugs, we need to make sure we’re doing it in the best possible way. The only way we can do that is by building teams that know how to collaborate, and represent the widest possible variety of ideas.
Finding the right environment at Iso
Having seen the need for urgency and the importance of collaboration first hand, getting the opportunity to work at Isomorphic Labs and to join as the company’s first scientist was incredibly exciting. Not only are we aiming to revolutionise the drug discovery process to help cure humanity’s most devastating diseases, but I have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the most brilliant minds in chemistry, biology and machine learning.
Iso is also a place where we’re committed to doing things differently. My career has shown me how science is, at its core, about challenging assumptions, and being willing to think about old problems in new ways. If we're serious about accelerating the pace of drug discovery, and revolutionising healthcare for humanity, that willingness to challenge assumptions can’t stop at the lab.
We’re continuing to strive for an even gender split, knowing that genuine collaboration can only happen through purposeful inclusivity. Even though the Science team has grown significantly we’ve continued to achieve that goal.
Part of this is because drug discovery is so intimately linked as a field to biology and chemistry: in the UK over half of all biology undergrads, and 40% of chemistry students are women, so setting out to recruit women is much easier than in other fields, where the intake is still predominantly male. But a critical part of it also comes from intent. If you’re looking for brilliant women on purpose, you’ll find them.
Interested in joining us? Register your details here
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Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, today announced the first phase of its management team. The company, established in November, was launched from Alphabet’s DeepMind to build on the success of AlphaFold, DeepMind’s work in protein folding that was heralded as the “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science and “Method of the Year” by Nature in 2021. Isomorphic Labs’ mission is to use AI and machine learning methods to accelerate and improve the drug discovery process. The company is a pioneer in the emerging field of “digital biology” and aims to usher in a new era of biomedical breakthroughs in order to find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases.
The new leaders join founder and acting CEO Demis Hassabis, who is currently serving as CEO of both DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. Together they comprise a truly multidisciplinary leadership team with expertise in domains across science, engineering, machine learning and business operations that will be needed to achieve the company’s goal of dramatically improving how drugs are discovered and developed. Drug development is currently a lengthy, expensive and high-risk process that is poised to benefit from advances in the application of AI and computational methods. Studies peg the cost of bringing a molecule to market at more than $2.5 billion per drug and timelines approaching a decade; in fact, only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“We’re thrilled to announce the formation of our extraordinary multidisciplinary leadership team that will allow us to deliver on our ambition to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles, with an AI-first approach,” said Hassabis. “The phenomenal success of AlphaFold demonstrated the huge impact that AI methods can potentially have on biology, and we plan to build powerful new predictive and generative models of biological phenomena to anticipate how drugs will perform and design novel molecules.”
The new additions to the Isomorphic Labs team include:
Dr. Congreve joins as Chief Scientific Officer from Sosei Heptares in the same role, where he pioneered Structure-Based Drug Design for G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). Previously he was director of chemistry at Astex Pharmaceuticals, helping to establish Fragment-Based Drug Design as a radical new approach to small molecule lead generation, and team leader at GlaxoSmithKline in medicinal chemistry and chemical technologies. In his 28-year career, Dr. Congreve has contributed to the design of 20 clinically evaluated drugs and he is co-inventor of Kisqali® (Ribociclib), a marketed treatment for breast cancers. He is co-author of over 180 publications and patents. In 2015, he was co-recipient of the RSC Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize for the seminal contributions to GPCR drug discovery made by Sosei Heptares. Dr. Congreve has a degree in biological chemistry from Leicester University and a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Cambridge University. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Dr. Yakneen joins as Chief Technology Officer, bringing over 20 years of experience in engineering, machine learning, product, life science, and medical research. Prior to this role he was senior vice president and chief technology officer at SOPHiA GENETICS, where he was responsible for the development and operation of a global AI-based molecular diagnostics and imaging software platform operating in more than 70 countries. He’s held senior roles at Amazon, where he launched the first Canadian software engineering center; at BPS Inc., where he developed a best-in-class Governance, Risk, and Compliance platform; at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, where he led the Technical Working Group of the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project, the world’s largest cancer data analysis initiative; and at EMBL where he developed a cloud-based scientific workflow framework. Dr. Yakneen holds a degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in computer science from Heidelberg University, where he developed novel distributed algorithms for analyzing cancer genomes.
Dr. Jaderberg joins as Director of Machine Learning from DeepMind, where he was a research scientist, leading the Open-Ended Learning research team and pioneering numerous algorithms bringing together large-scale deep learning and reinforcement learning to achieve breakthrough results with AI. Prior to that, he was CEO and co-founder of Vision Factory, a company that specialized in image recognition technology with deep learning, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and subsequently became part of DeepMind. He is widely published in the top journals and conferences, with work now part of textbooks. His research interests are in AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning and generative modeling. Dr. Jaderberg completed his undergraduate degree in engineering science at the University of Oxford and his PhD with the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, where he developed state-of-the-art algorithms for image understanding.
Ms. Richenburg joins as Director of People Operations from Eigen Technologies, where she was senior vice president of people. She is skilled in the development and implementation of innovative people strategies that drive business growth and performance. She has held a variety of human resources roles at companies including Meridian Life Sciences, Bioline and Evotec. Ms. Richenburg is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, medicinal and biological chemistry and earned a master’s degree in human resources management from Oxford Brookes University.
Join us
The company is continuing to scale and is currently seeking talent at various levels with a focus on scientific, engineering and operational roles, along with biologists, medicinal chemists, biophysicists, clinicians, computational scientists, and machine learning experts to contribute to our mission of using AI to accelerate the drug discovery process. For information on open roles, please visit: www.isomorphiclabs.com/join.
Isomorphic Labs is a subsidiary of Alphabet that was launched from Alphabet’s DeepMind in 2021, with headquarters in London. It was founded and is led by AI pioneer Demis Hassabis, who also co-founded and leads DeepMind. As pioneers in digital biology, the company’s mission is to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and ultimately find cures for some of humanity’s most devastating diseases. Using its AI-first approach to drug discovery and biology, the company’s ambition is to advance a new era of medical breakthroughs. For more information, go to www.isomorphiclabs.com.
