Google DeepMind spin-off Isomorphic Labs is building an AI drug design engine that it believes can “solve” all diseases. We spoke to its Chief Technology Officer in Lausanne about Switzerland’s key role, AI hype, and what it will take to cure cancer. In 2013, Sergei Yakneen was on the fast track to a brilliant tech career, managing a team of software engineers at Amazon in Toronto, Canada, when his life took a dramatic turn. His mother died of pancreatic cancer aged just 54. Yakneen grew up in the 1980s surrounded by doctors and scientists in Krasnoyarsk, a major industrial city in central Siberia, that was part of a Siberian network of scientific and research centres during the Soviet period. Yet he never felt the calling to become a doctor like his mother, an oncologist at the city hospital. “I was more interested in computers,” said Yakneen, who would spend hours assembling computers and writing computer programmes as a kid. But watching the doctors in his family search for a ...
