Google DeepMind Scientist Uses AI to Chase Cures

Vivek Natarajan, a research lead at Google DeepMind, told Business Insider that his father's 35-year career and subsequent decline from Parkinson's disease shaped his decision to apply AI to medicine. Business Insider reports that Natarajan aims to develop AI tools that can help doctors and scientists propose experiments and accelerate the search for new treatments. Business Insider quotes Natarajan: "I asked this question to myself, 'okay, where is AI going to generally have the most impact?' And to me, that answer felt like medicine and science." The article states that Natarajan worked at Meta by 2017 as deep learning moved from research into industry.

Natarajan leads research at the intersection of AI, science, and medicine at Google DeepMind, per Google Research. His projects include medical foundation models such as Med-PaLM and the conversational diagnostic system AMIE, and multi-agent systems such as the AI co-scientist - a Gemini-based system designed to act as a virtual scientific collaborator, per Google Research and press coverage. The Air Street Press RAAIS 2026 conference program lists Natarajan as a featured researcher presenting on biomedical AI applications.

AI-driven drug-discovery and biomedical research work typically centers on hypothesis generation, experimental prioritization, and target identification - with human-in-the-loop validation required before lab steps. Practitioners in this space report that progress depends on data quality, domain collaboration, and reproducibility: the link between a model suggestion and a validated experimental outcome remains technically demanding.

Track publications, open-source tools, and benchmarked workflows from Google DeepMind's biomedical AI group, as well as progress on datasets, synthetic-data methods, and platforms that enable reproducible model-driven experiment proposals at scale. The Business Insider profile documents one practitioner's path and motivations; it does not announce a new product or technical release from Google DeepMind.