Dr. Rebecca Paul

Rebecca Paul is a Senior Research Leader at Isomorphic Labs, a digital biology company aiming to redefine drug discovery with artificial intelligence. She studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before moving to Imperial College London to complete her PhD as part of the Institute of Chemical Biology. Following 6 years at Sosei-Heptares, she moved into the AI drug design space at Benevolent AI, where she worked for 4 years in the neurodegeneration field. Rebecca joined Isomorphic Labs in 2022, where she currently leads the Medicinal Drug Design Group.

AI-first fragment-based drug discovery at Isomorphic Labs

Isomorphic Labs is a digital biology company working to reimagine drug discovery with the power and pace of artificial intelligence. The company was founded with the belief that cutting edge computational and AI methods hold promise to improve upon traditional approaches to drug design. Through the application of AlphaFold 3 (Abramson et al, 2024), developed by Isomorphic Labs in collaboration with Google DeepMind, along with other breakthrough AI models developed at Isomorphic Labs, the company is able to better understand the underlying biological mechanisms related to therapeutic targets of interest and advance the rational design and optimisation of small molecules.
One thesis currently being explored at Isomorphic Labs is the potential to enable the rapid optimisation of fragments to leads. The use of AlphaFold 3 allows scientists at Isomorphic Labs to work on structure-based rational drug design without the need for experimental structure determination. In addition, the power of the company’s generative AI in combination with its predictive models, enables rapid elaboration of fragment starting points. The combination of both these elements holds potential for fragment-based drug design at Isomorphic Labs and progress towards this approach will be presented.