The future is now, in the fight against cancer, one of healthcare’s deadliest adversaries. At The Washington Post’s September 17 “Chasing Cancer: Advancing Tech” webinar, leaders from the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors described how artificial intelligence is reshaping everything from early drug discovery to clinical trials.

Their message, now at fever pitch across the medical community: AI is no longer theoretical. It is here, and it is redefining the timeline of hope.

From DeepMind to drug design

Colin Murdoch, president of Isomorphic Labs, set the tone of the presentation. His company, a Google DeepMind offshoot, is preparing for its first human trials of AI-designed cancer drugs, powered by AlphaFold, the Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough that finally cracked protein structures. AlphaFold, now built into Isomorphic’s drug engine, gives scientists a fast track to more precise medicines.

“When proteins go wrong, that tends to lead to disease, and in this case, cancer,” Murdoch said. “It’s a bit like a lock-and-key mechanism. AlphaFold let us finally see those structures in three dimensions. Before, it took years of painstaking work and millions of dollars in equipment just to map a single protein.”

Breaking the bottleneck
Time, Murdoch stressed, is critical. Traditional drug discovery takes up to 15 years, costs billions, and fails, nine times out of ten. Meanwhile, cancer kills more than half a million Americans each year. “We think [AI] can have a profound impact on the time and the money it takes to get a drug to the clinic,” Murdoch said. Just as important, he added, is the potential to design better drugs, not just faster ones.

Isomorphic’s approach is “generalizable.” What works in one cancer program can inform the next, sparing researchers from starting over and pushing out therapies that are sharper and — more widely applicable.

Precision without punishment
Cancer is not a single disease but hundreds, each with its own set of complexities. Personalized therapies are the holy grail, and Murdoch believes AI can help deliver them. By modeling how potential drugs interact with both cancer-causing proteins and healthy ones, Isomorphic hopes to make treatments more precise, and less grueling for patients.

“We believe our technology is not only going to help with treating the cancer but also dramatically reduce the side effects,” he said. That dual promise — effective therapies that spare patients added suffering — could redefine what it means to live with cancer.

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