From London To Lausanne: How Isomorphic Labs Is Rewriting Drug Discovery

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) 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. Select your language

Generated with artificial intelligence. Listening: From London to Lausanne: how Isomorphic Labs is rewriting drug discovery This content was published on January 30, 2026 - 09:00 11 minutes Jessica Davis Plüss (text) Thomas Kern (photos)

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, which had a reputation as a land of exile for opponents of the Russian regime.

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 treatment for his mother's cancer took him in a different direction.

“I felt helpless in my tech career,” said Yakneen, who was 33 at the time.“I couldn't stay in the tech world in good conscience. I kept thinking to myself – in the future, if one of my kids is confronted with the same disease, what will have been my contribution to the solution?”

He quit his job at Amazon to join the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. There he used his tech know-how to analyse DNA sequencing data from thousands of cancer patients to understand how genetic mutations shape the onset and progression of cancer.

Almost a decade later, in 2022, Yakneen became the Lausanne-based Chief Technology Officer and part of the founding team at one of the most talked-about companies in the AI drug discovery field – Isomorphic Labs.

Sergei Yakneen grew up in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, and immigrated to Toronto, Canada aged 14, after the fall of the Soviet Union. He spent the next 21 years in Canada, where he studied computer science and mathematics and was first exposed to neural networks and machine learning. He worked at several different companies, including e-commerce giant Amazon, launching its first Canadian software engineering organisation.

He then became a research assistant at the Ontario Cancer Research Institute and helped to lead the technical working group of the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project – the world's largest cancer data analysis initiative.

He went on to do a PhD in computational biology and cancer genomics in Heidelberg, Germany, where he wrote algorithms for analysing genomic data at population scale. This landed him a job at SOPHiA GENETICS, a Swiss healthcare technology company that creates AI platforms to help clinicians and researchers interpret complex genetic and clinical data. Yakneen joined Isomorphic Labs as Chief Technology Officer in 2022, shortly after the company's founding in November the previous year.

The London-based company was spun out of Google's AI lab DeepMind in 2021 with the mission to“solve all diseases with AI”. Its founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, co-won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 with his colleague John Jumper for developing a groundbreaking AI model, AlphaFold. Together they'd solved a problem chemists had wrestled with for over 50 years: predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein.

Most drugs work by binding to precise points in a protein, which is only possible by knowing its 3D shape. Identifying this shape was a slow and expensive process that could take as long as five years, until AlphaFold came along and did it in minutes.

“It was clear right away how transformative this model was,” said Yakneen, who was working at SOPHiA GENETICS when the second version of AlphaFold (there are now three) was released in late 2020.“It could take an entire PhD to decipher the structure of a single protein. With AlphaFold 2, you could punch in the amino-acid sequence and get the 3D structure prediction at nearly the same level of accuracy.”

It would be hard to find a pharmaceutical company or biotechnology lab in the world that isn't using AlphaFold or an AlphaFold-inspired structure-prediction model at some stage of their research.

On its own, AlphaFold can't cure diseases, but that was never the goal, said Yakneen.“We are building a whole suite of AI models that all together, in concert, are our drug design engine that we believe will create medicines faster, more economically, and at much higher success rates.”

>> Find out more about AlphaFold and how it solved a 50-year-old mystery

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This is exactly what drew him to the company.“The mission is not just about going after one particular disease or one sliver of the drug discovery problem, but to build general models that will help us eventually solve all diseases,” he said. This includes diseases long thought undruggable.

The“grand challenge”, he said, is getting to the point where our AI models can design a variety of molecules with very specific properties – almost like tailor-made medicine for a specific person and disease.

Isomorphic is now a key player in an increasingly competitive race to revolutionise drug development with AI.

Pharma giants Novartis and Eli Lilly, developer of the blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss drug Zepbound, have already partnered with Isomorphic to discover new drug candidates in deals that could be worth billions. In January, it signed a deal with US healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson to tackle“difficult to drug” disease targets across treatment modalities. Isomorphic is also developing its own drug candidate portfolio focused on oncology and immunology.

The third version of AlphaFold was jointly released by Isomorphic Labs and Google Deepmind in 2024, allowing researchers to model the structures and interactions of all of life's molecules. The company has since developed further breakthroughs that tackle the full spectrum of complexity in drug design.

The Lausanne connection

As Chief Technology Officer, Yakneen is in charge of building a team to develop the technology behind Isomorphic's“drug design engine” and suggested Lausanne as the place to do it alongside its London headquarters.

Yakneen fell in love with the city after relocating there in 2019 to work at SOPHiA GENETICS, where he oversaw the development and operation of a global AI-based molecular diagnostics platform.

Perched above Lake Geneva, Switzerland's fourth-largest city is home to several universities, including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) – one of Europe's top science and engineering universities, on par with the US's prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“I was immediately struck by both the beauty of this region but also how entrepreneurial and sophisticated the local tech and AI scene was,” he said.“I thought anyone would want to be here if they're not here already.”

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