IIUC most of the commercialization is done through Isomorphic (https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/). My guess is that Google Research/DM itself wants to stay at the front of the field rather than develop drugs (of which protein design is really just a tiny contribution).
When I worked at Google I made a case for doing protein design/preliminary drug discovery using Google infrastructure and it was well received by the leadership. The leadership at Google is mostly computer scientists who know about, but can't actually do, leading-edge life sciences research, and they want to contribute some amount of Google's resources to advancing the state of the art. That's the only reason exacycle was permitted- because Urs thought we could maybe help save the world with protein design (and it wasn't a good approach because it wasted enormous amounts of power on unbiased sampling of large proteins).
Honestly I don't think Google proper is really a good place for this work to be applied, though. Their attention is easily diverted, they repeatedly fail to commercialize, and most importantly, potential partners are scared Google will steal their data, and replace their business.
I wonder why things seem to work well with Waymo? Google was never in the auto industry, but they were able to create a subsidiary that has become a leader in automated driving system.
Yeah, waymo is a bit of an outlier and I think it's got to be a directive from Larry to spend some amount of money/engineering effort to move it forward, with the expectation that it will transform the world into a better place (rather than generate a lot of revenue for Google).
So deepmind is doing more of the fundamental stuff and isomorphic the commercialization? I thought isomorphic would have been carrying the protein projects now since Google brain/deepmind, now Google deepmind, is focusing on catching up with openai and stuff and less on fundamental research
When I worked at Google I made a case for doing protein design/preliminary drug discovery using Google infrastructure and it was well received by the leadership. The leadership at Google is mostly computer scientists who know about, but can't actually do, leading-edge life sciences research, and they want to contribute some amount of Google's resources to advancing the state of the art. That's the only reason exacycle was permitted- because Urs thought we could maybe help save the world with protein design (and it wasn't a good approach because it wasted enormous amounts of power on unbiased sampling of large proteins).
Honestly I don't think Google proper is really a good place for this work to be applied, though. Their attention is easily diverted, they repeatedly fail to commercialize, and most importantly, potential partners are scared Google will steal their data, and replace their business.