GTC 2026 brought that energy straight into life sciences. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's keynote framed agentic AI as the next platform shift, and the life sciences sector seems to be taking that literally. Agents are now everywhere you look: IQVIA rolled out over 150 of them across clinical and commercial workflows, Insilico added one for translational biology, Latent Labs has one designing antibodies from text prompts, and NVIDIA itself unveiled a full surgical robotics stack.

We now have two top pharma companies in an apparent compute arms race within the same quarter. Roche's 3,500+ Blackwell GPUs positioned as the largest announced pharma GPU footprint, right on the heels of Lilly‘s LillyPod supercomputer and its $1B co-innovation lab with NVIDIA announced at JP Morgan.

Startups are matching the energy: Xaira, backed by nearly $1 billion in funding, has now launched a 4.9-billion-parameter virtual cell model, Earendil, since our note of their plans for a ~$500M IPO last week, pulled in $787 million for AI-driven biologics, and the overall VC wave into AI-native bio keeps building. Speaking broadly of AI-native startups, Huang pointed to ~$150 billion in venture funding flowing their way last year.

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Roche launched its own large-scale AI computing hub for drug discovery, development, and manufacturing after buying 2,176 Blackwell GPUs (bringing its total capacity above 3,500), supporting model training, biological data analysis, lab-linked workflows, and factory digital twins.

🔹 AI reasons about protein function — Arc Institute researchers introduced a multimodal model for protein function prediction that combines protein embeddings with language-model reasoning, beating prior public benchmarks, generating step-by-step biological explanations, and earning preference over curated annotations in 79% of expert comparisons.

🔹 At GTC, UCL and partners unveiled what they describe as a first hybrid quantum-GPU biomolecular simulation pipeline, combining quantum hardware with 120 H100 GPUs to model a major drug-target protein class at realistic biological scale.

🔹 Xaira Therapeutics launched a 4.9-billion-parameter AI virtual cell model that predicts cellular responses to genetic perturbations, trained on 25.6 million perturbed single-cell transcriptomes and reported to generalize to unseen biological contexts.

🔹 Latent Labs, after coming out of stealth last February, launches an AI agent that designs therapeutic antibodies from text prompts in hours, reporting ~67% success with nanomolar affinities.

🔹 At GTC 2026, NVIDIA launched Proteina-Complexa, a generative protein binder design model accepted as an oral presentation at ICLR 2026, built on Proteina (ICLR 2025) and extending it to full atomistic binder design with inference-time compute scaling. Novo Nordisk, Manifold Bio, and Viva Biotech participated in wet lab validation. Other announcements also included a surgical robotics stack: Open-H (700+ hours of surgical video), Cosmos-H (synthetic surgical data generation), GR00T-H (vision-language-action model for clinical robotics), and Rheo (a simulation framework).

🔹 IQVIA launched a unified AI platform to support clinical, commercial, and real-world decision-making, with 150+ deployed agents, and 100+ AI patent filings.

🔹 Open-source protein design workflow — Dyno Therapeutics unveiled an open-source agentic AI suite for protein binder design that pairs generative models with lab-trained predictive filters.

🔹 Agentic AI for translational biology — Insilico Medicine launched a new AI analysis agent for therapeutic discovery that lets biologists use natural language to run multi-omics and bioinformatics workflows, drawing on 140+ scientific skills and 1,000+ tools.

🔹 To fix the experimental bottleneck, Arctoris opened a new biophysics center in the UK to generate drug-binding and protein-quality data at scale for AI-driven discovery.

🔹 Building a massive genomics dataset for AI — Basecamp Research launched a Trillion Gene Atlas to collect genomic data from 100+ million species, aiming to expand biological training data for AI models through global sampling.

🔹 AlphaFold adds protein interaction context — the AF database now includes 1.7 million predicted homodimer structures from an initial 30 million candidates, expanding beyond single proteins to capture how identical protein pairs may interact across 20 key organisms.

🔹 Automated labels can quietly worsen medical AI bias — Researchers found breast tumor segmentation models do far worse on younger patients for qualitative reasons, and training on machine-generated labels can amplify the disparity by ~40% while biased benchmarks can hide the damage.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Earendil Labs raised $787 million to scale AI-driven antibody and biologics discovery, expand teams, and advance a pipeline of 40+ programs, including one program ready for Phase 2 and multiple regulatory filings planned for 2026-2027.

🔹 Neuracle‘s commercial approval triggered a funding wave across China’s BCI sector: Shanghai-based StairMed raised ~$73M for its robot-inserted flexible electrode approach, while Gestala pulled in $21M just two months after launch for a non-invasive ultrasound BCI platform.

🔹 Verily raised $300M and became an independent company, using the capital to expand its AI-ready health data platform, consumer health tools, and clinical/research agents while Alphabet shifts to a minority stake.

🔹 Rivia raised €13M to build AI agents for clinical trial operations, expanding its unified data platform to proactively flag risks, anomalies, and enrollment issues in regulated trial workflows.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Nia Therapeutics received FDA Breakthrough Device status for an AI-guided brain implant aimed at memory loss after traumatic brain injury, with a study reporting a 19% recall improvement by detecting poor memory-encoding states and delivering targeted stimulation.

🔹 Brain activity restored after deep freezing — researchers in Germany revived key functions in vitrified mouse brain slices after storage at up to −150 °C for as long as seven days, preserving neuronal firing, metabolism, and synaptic plasticity.

🔹 ReVision Implant won FDA Breakthrough Device status for a brain-stimulation visual prosthesis designed to restore functional vision in blindness beyond the retina, with planned surgical testing in October 2026.

🔹 Mind typing nears everyday speeds — Massachusetts General Hospital researchers enabled two people with paralysis to type on a standard digital keyboard using brain implants that decode imagined finger movements, reaching 22 words per minute with low error after training on just 30 sentences.

🔹 “No, we haven’t uploaded a fly yet”—scientists push back on viral claims of a digital fruit fly, arguing the demo stitched together existing brain and body models with pre-programmed behaviors, falling far short of true whole-brain emulation.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 FDA pushes shift beyond animal testing, issuing draft guidance to validate non-animal methods like organoids, lab models, and simulations for drug safety testing, aiming to replace animal studies with more predictive human-relevant data and speed clinical development.

🔹 NIH committed $150M investment in human-based research to reduce reliance on animal models, framed around its Complement-ARIE program.

🔹 arXiv’s move out of Cornell—Science reports it will become an independent nonprofit on July 1, 2026.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

Former GSK AI Leaders Launch Stealth Oncology Startup — Shane Lewin and Nick Peterson, who both recently left GSK after six years building the pharma giant’s AI/ML and research data infrastructure, have co-founded Clockwork Bio (Lewin as CEO, Peterson as CTO).

The stealth-mode startup is building an AI-native platform for preclinical oncology drug discovery, arguing that conventional pipelines designed around heritable genetic targets fail for cancer, where disease is driven by epigenetic regulation, cell signaling, and lineage switching.

Their approach combines active learning, AI-based phenotyping, and emerging modalities to force cells between healthy and diseased states in vitro while learning the underlying biology at scale.

No funding or team details disclosed, formal product launch expected later in 2026.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

Cancer as a Data Problem: What AI Is Doing in Oncology

Caveat: the science of personalized oncogenomics isn't new, and the AI mostly helped a non-specialist navigate tools that already exist. This still required serious money and a lab willing to help, but the tooling is getting faster and more navigable even for non-specialists.

Meanwhile, Google’s diagnostic AI ran pre-appointment patient interviews at a real clinic—100 patients, no safety incidents, accuracy allegedly on par with primary care doctors. OpenFold Consortium now released its full training pipeline with datasets, weights, and training code.

On the money side: an AI-driven protein engineering startup Earendil is reportedly eyeing a Hong Kong IPO that could raise up to $500M. Breakout Ventures closed $114M for early-stage neuroscience and biomedical AI. Seemay Chou launched Radial, a $500M effort aimed at the scientific data infrastructure that AI tools depend on but nobody wants to fund. And Owkin spun out its diagnostics work as Waiv with $33M for oncology stratification.

Elsewhere: China cleared the first minimally invasive BCI for everyday home use. Researchers published a molecule-level simulation of a full bacterial cell cycle. Also—arXiv is separating from Cornell to go independent and is looking for a CEO.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 A pet owner used AI to build his dog a custom cancer vaccine and it worked. After surgery and chemo failed, an Australian engineer used ChatGPT to map a treatment plan, AlphaFold to identify tumor targets, and eventually convinced a university lab to manufacture a personalized mRNA vaccine in under two months.

🔹 Microsoft launched Copilot Health, a dedicated health companion that pulls together wearable data, medical records from 50,000+ US providers, and lab results into one place.

🔹 An AI doctor’s assistant just passed its first real-world test. Google‘s diagnostic AI conducted pre-appointment patient interviews at a real clinic—100 patients, zero safety incidents, and its diagnostic accuracy matched that of primary care doctors.

🔹 The OpenFold Consortium released the complete OpenFold3 training pipeline—datasets, weights, training and inference code—making this biomolecular complex prediction system fully reproducible and extensible and not just inference-accessible. Antibody-antigen prediction remains an open frontier and a stated 2026 priority.

🔹 AI beats specialists at rare disease diagnosis. A Nature-published agentic system integrating 40+ clinical and genomic tools outperformed experienced physicians, with traceable, evidence-linked reasoning; over 500 institutions signed up since its July 2025 launch.

🔹 Structural confidence scores don’t predict cellular function. A 12,000-design CAR-T binder benchmark found only 5.9% of AI-generated designs worked (rising to 10.6% with basic sequence filters) while standard metrics (pLDDT, ipTM, Rosetta) had near-zero predictive power. The core failure: RFdiffusion’s helix-heavy backbones combined with ProteinMPNN’s bias toward lysine/glutamate produce sequences that stall ribosomes in cells. The one top-performing team folded designs in full CAR context rather than isolation.

🔹 Weeks of compute compressed into hours. Schrödinger says it uses Google Cloud GPUs to screen billions of compounds in a single weekend.

🔹 A living cell, simulated molecule by molecule. Researchers built a complete 4D whole-cell model of a minimal bacterium covering gene expression, DNA replication, metabolism, and division across a ~100-minute cell cycle. Each simulated cell is unique due to stochasticity, and the model correctly predicts doubling time, ribosome counts, and daughter-cell variability.

🔹 Asimov Press published a beginner-accessible walkthrough on computational antibody design using BoltzGen.

🔹 BigHat Biosciences benchmarked 30+ protein language models for antibody design with wet lab validation and found that model choice matters less than how one uses it, and that even a few hundred experimental datapoints outperforms any zero-shot approach.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI drug discovery startup Earendil (combining generative protein engineering with wet lab work to develop biologics) is reportedly eyeing a Hong Kong IPO that could raise up to $500M, following Insilico Medicine‘s successful listing there last year. Partnerships with Sanofi, Wuxi XDC, and Wuxi Biologics already in place.

🔹 Breakout Ventures raised $114M for its third fund, targeting early-stage neuroscience and biomedical AI: lab automation, computational chemistry, and AI-powered research tools. Early bets include a lab robotics startup; their track record includes a $300M Halozyme acquisition and the first FDA-cleared rapid sepsis diagnostic.

🔹 DeepMind and MIT alumni raised $13.5M to build a platform that connects ideas across scientific fields, proposes testable hypotheses, and runs simulations before experiments.

🔹 Using salmonella to fight cancer. Salspera is raising $91M to fund a phase 3 trial of an engineered salmonella strain that delivers an immune-boosting signal directly into tumors, previously showing reduced tumor burden and improved survival in metastatic pancreatic cancer. A two-person team, an orphan drug tag, and a Nasdaq listing on the horizon.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 First invasive BCI for paralysis cleared for everyday use in China—a minimally invasive implant that sits above the motor cortex has been cleared for everyday home use in paralyzed patients, translating imagined hand movements into a robotic glove.

🔹 Large gene insertion without the toxicity. Massachusetts General Hospital researchers developed a genome editing approach using circular single-stranded DNA donors to achieve kilobase-scale gene integration, avoiding the immune response triggered by the double-stranded DNA donors traditionally required for large insertions.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 The internet’s preprint library is going independent. arXiv—the free platform hosting 2.7 million scientific papers that the entire AI and life sciences research world depends on—is separating from Cornell University to become an independent nonprofit, and is hiring its first CEO at ~$300K. The academic community’s main worry is that independence means paywalls eventually follow.

🔹 UK bets £500M on homegrown AI. The government’s new Sovereign AI fund launches April 16, with life sciences as a priority sector.

🔹 A Middle Eastern shipping lane could empty American pharmacy shelves. Nearly half of U.S. generic prescriptions come from India, which depends on the Strait of Hormuz for 40% of its crude oil—a key input for drug manufacturing. Current stockpiles give 30–60 days of buffer, but a prolonged closure would hit generics hardest, as thin margins leave little room to absorb rising fuel and petrochemical costs.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 Owkin spun out its diagnostics arm as Waiv with $33M in fresh funding, focused on AI-powered patient stratification tests for oncology—both in clinics and clinical trials.

🔹 AI in science is only as good as the infrastructure beneath it. Researcher Seemay Chou launched Radial, a $500M organization focused on modernizing how scientific data is generated, shared, and built upon—the “unglamorous” infreastucture and tools AI needs to deliver real value. Early projects include better methods for capturing protein dynamics.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

Foundational and open source: Arc Institute published its Evo 2, a 40B-parameter genomic foundation model that can generate and analyze DNA sequences, in Nature, while French Raidium released an open-source foundation model for reading CT and MRI scans.

Meanwhile, a Neuralink co-founder pulled in $230M for a rice-grain-sized retinal implant, researchers uploaded a full fruit fly brain connectome into a simulated body and got it to move, and Japan approved the first iPSC-derived therapies for heart failure and Parkinson's.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe now

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI boosts drug manufacturing — Eli Lilly, led by CIO Diogo Rau, used AI-powered digital twins of its factories to optimize production and defect detection for its blockbuster GLP-1 drugs, enabling significantly higher output of its diabetes and weight-loss treatments.

🔹 Open-source radiology foundation model — Raidium released Curia-2, an open-source AI model for analyzing CT and MRI scans that detects ~200 radiological findings and achieved 88.6% accuracy on 3D imaging benchmarks, with a 2B-parameter version available on Hugging Face.

🔹 Generative AI for DNA design — Arc Institute, Stanford University, and NVIDIA published Evo 2 in Nature, a 40B-parameter open-source genomic foundation model that can generate and analyze DNA sequences, with experiments showing AI-designed sequences can alter chromatin accessibility in living cells.

🔹 Automating protein lead optimization — Dutch company Cradle released the CRADLE-1 framework on bioRxiv, a machine-learning system that automates protein lead optimization across modalities (antibodies, enzymes, peptides, vaccines, gene-editing systems), achieving ~90-95% success in meeting target product profiles in validated campaigns.

🔹 On-premise AI for drug discovery — Liquid AI and Insilico Medicine released a 2.6B-parameter foundation model designed to run on private pharmaceutical infrastructure, enabling tasks like molecular design, ADMET prediction, and retrosynthesis while keeping sensitive data on-premise.

🔹 AI-designed anemia drug enters clinic — Insilico Medicine announced that its AI-discovered oral therapy for chronic kidney disease–related anemia has begun Phase I trials after first patient dosing by TaiGen Biotechnology, following a licensing deal for Greater China rights in December 2025.

🔹 Cloud access to robotic labs — Ginkgo Bioworks launched Ginkgo Cloud Lab, a web-based platform where researchers can submit natural-language experiment protocols that AI agents translate into automated workflows executed on robotic lab infrastructure with 70+ instruments.

🔹 AI-enabled nanobody discovery — MindWalk Holdings launched the B Cell Llama platform, combining llama-derived VHH nanobody discovery with AI-guided candidate selection to develop bispecific antibodies and cell therapies, supported by a peer-reviewed study showing enhanced potency and cross-variant activity.

🔹 AI-driven small-molecule discovery — Ono Pharmaceutical expanded its collaboration with Congruence Therapeutics to discover small-molecule drugs for neurology and immunology using AI models that analyze dynamic protein structures and identify hidden binding pockets.

🔹 Dynamic AI models for biology — Sentinal4D, led by Chris Bakal, is developing AI systems trained on time-resolved 3D imaging of living cells to model cell behavior and drug responses, addressing limitations highlighted by Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks and AstraZeneca bioinformatics director Ming Tang that current AI relies mostly on static biological data.

🔹 AI smart goggles for labs — Stanford University and Princeton University researchers developed LabOS, an AI-powered smart-goggle system using NVIDIA vision-language models that watches scientists’ hands during experiments and guides protocols in real time to prevent mistakes and help novices perform like experts.

🔹 AI “virtual pharma” study — Stanford University researchers simulated a virtual drug company using ~37,000 AI agents to analyze 56,000 clinical trials, finding that drugs targeting cell-type-specific genes are 48% more likely to reach market and show 32% fewer adverse events.

🔹 Self-driving lab discovers new lipid designs — Researchers in a Cell study developed the LUMI-lab autonomous system that combines robotics and AI to explore 221,000 lipid candidates for mRNA delivery, discovering brominated lipid structures that improved delivery efficiency and achieved ~20% in vivo CRISPR editing in lung cells, with the platform’s code and hardware released open source.

🔹 FDA-cleared AI for early stroke detection — Harrison.ai received FDA clearance for an AI system that analyzes routine non-contrast brain CT scans to flag early signs of ischemic stroke and prioritize urgent cases for faster clinical review. Also: Harrison.ai expanded its imaging AI platform by adding AIRAmed, Koios Medical, Lunit, and Nanox AI, enabling hospitals to access multiple AI tools for X-ray, CT, MRI, mammography, and ultrasound through a single vendor-neutral infrastructure.

🔹 Amazon Web Services launched Amazon Connect Health, a suite of AI agents that automate tasks like patient identity verification, appointment scheduling, clinical note generation, medical coding, and summarizing patient histories for clinicians.

🔹 Generalist medical AI model — Harvard researcher Pranav Rajpurkar and collaborators introduced MedVersa in NEJM AI, a multimodal foundation model that analyzes medical images and clinical text to generate diagnoses and reports, outperforming several specialized systems and reducing radiology reporting errors and time in clinical tests.

🔹 AI for rare disease diagnosis — Nature study reports that the DeepRare agentic AI system integrates 40+ medical and genomic analysis tools to diagnose rare diseases with traceable reasoning, reportedly outperforming experienced physicians and attracting registrations from 500+ medical institutions since July 2025.

🔹 AI agents for bioinformatics infrastructure — recently launched Phylo introduced Biomni, an AI research agent that lets scientists run large-scale bioinformatics pipelines and models like AlphaFold using natural language while orchestrating GPU-heavy HPC workloads, massive datasets, and asynchronous jobs in specialized research environments.

AI, Generally:

🔹 Autonomous AI research loop — Andrej Karpathy open-sourced an AI agent that autonomously modifies training code and runs ~100 machine-learning experiments overnight on a single GPU using a fixed 5-minute evaluation loop, demonstrating how agentic systems can iteratively improve models with minimal human input through a simple Markdown-defined research strategy.

🔹 Limits of current AI reasoning — On the a16z podcast, Vishal Misra and Martin Casado discuss how modern deep learning systems optimize for Shannon entropy (statistical pattern prediction) but lack Kolmogorov-style causal mechanism discovery, arguing that current AI cannot generate Einstein-level scientific theories because it cannot extend its hypothesis space or perform counterfactual causal reasoning.

🔹 AI discoveries humans may not understand — Asimov Press highlights the emerging “legibility problem,” where increasingly autonomous AI systems could generate scientific discoveries beyond human comprehension, raising concerns about whether humans will be able to interpret, validate, or apply AI-generated knowledge.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Retinal implant for vision restoration — Science Corporation, founded by Max Hodak (Neuralink co-founder), raised $230M Series C (total $490M) to commercialize a rice-grain–sized retinal implant that converts infrared signals from smart glasses into electrical stimulation, restoring partial vision in patients with degenerative eye diseases.

🔹 AI-driven microbiome modeling —Outpost Bio raised $3.5M pre-seed to build a “lab-in-the-loop” platform combining automated microbiology experiments with machine learning to model and predict changes in the human microbiome.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Tempus AI expanded a multi-year collaboration with Merck to use multimodal clinical and molecular datasets with AI analytics to identify oncology biomarkers, study treatment resistance, and guide precision medicine drug development.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Living neurons play video games — Cortical Labs demonstrated that ~200,000 lab-grown human neurons connected to microelectrode arrays can learn to play the video game Doom by translating game visuals into electrical stimulation and using neural activity to control in-game actions, highlighting early progress toward biological computing systems.

🔹 Embodied whole-brain emulation — reports how Eon Systems demonstrated a connectome-derived digital model of the entire fruit fly brain (~125k neurons, ~50M synapses) controlling a physics-simulated body to generate multiple behaviors, marking a milestone toward scalable brain emulation and future mouse- and human-scale digital brains.

🔹 First iPSC therapies approved — Cuorips and Sumitomo Pharma received Japan’s first approval for induced pluripotent stem cell–derived treatments targeting heart failure and Parkinson’s disease, marking the first commercialization of iPSC regenerative therapies.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Leadership change at FDA biologics division —Vinay Prasad, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, will leave the agency at the end of April after a contentious tenure overseeing vaccines and gene therapies, with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary confirming a search for his successor.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

A newly launched U.S. brain health clinic network also raised $80M to bring psychiatric and neurological care, FDA-regulated clinical trials, and an AI-based coordination platform under one roof, combining in-person services with research infrastructure, with one site named after the late Dr. Nolan R. Williams, known for co-developing the FDA-cleared neuromodulation system.

According to the latest report, China biopharma licensing is no longer “cheap”. Generate:Biomedicines went public, raising $400M in its IPO and debuting at a valuation above $1B, though shares traded down after listing. Also, IQVIA said it will buy selected Charles River discovery assets to add in-vitro capabilities and a machine-learning small-molecule platform to its offering.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe now

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Pharma-scale AI compute — Eli Lilly brought online its in-house AI supercomputer in Indianapolis with 1,000+ GPUs delivering ~9,000 petaflops, built to train biology/chemistry/genomics foundation models and support drug discovery and clinical development using ~700 TB of genomics data.

🔹 Shared standards for AI in biology — the international BEACON consortium, coordinated by the open-science nonprofit Conscience, launched to unify benchmarking across AI-driven disease biology and small-molecule discovery via community challenges, shared datasets, and an open validation platform, with a public debut at a Barcelona symposium on March 18–19, 2026.

🔹 Community-built AMR datasets — The Align Foundation and Google DeepMind launched a global effort to define AI-ready antimicrobial-resistance datasets and evaluation benchmarks.

🔹 Privacy-preserving ADMET modeling — Lundbeck, Orion, Recursion, Servier, and another drugmaker put ~80% of their internal ADMET data into a federated-learning network run by Apheris to improve absorption/metabolism/toxicity prediction without sharing raw proprietary datasets, initially for small molecules.

🔹 Scaling tissue AI models — Bruker and Noetik expanded their partnership to generate larger spatial single-cell human tissue datasets (building on 3,500+ patients) to train foundation models for translational and therapeutic use.

🔹 AI spots early diabetes tissue signals — Researchers at the German Center for Diabetes Research trained explainable deep-learning models on gigapixel pancreas slides from living donors to distinguish type 2 diabetes and pinpoint subtle structural changes (islet cell patterns, nerve fibers, and fat–islet proximity) that may serve as biomarkers.

🔹 AI to speed clinical trials — Evinova signed clinical-development AI partnerships with Astellas and AstraZeneca (after BMS) to use shared operational data to optimize trial design and execution, claiming ~5–7% cost savings per study.

🔹 AI planning for brain drug delivery — Brainlab and Precision NeuroMed partnered to build an AI-enabled planning platform for direct brain infusion to standardize patient-specific delivery, starting with recurrent glioblastoma and expanding to other CNS diseases.

🔹 Bo Wang, SVP and Head of Biomedical AI at Xaira Therapeutics, argues that diffusion models may be better suited than autoregressive models for biological foundation models, because biology (proteins, gene expression, regulatory DNA) is inherently bidirectional and high-dimensional rather than sequential like language. Separately.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 China licensing prices surge — Evaluate data show average upfront payments in Western–China biopharma licensing jumped 230% from $52M (2022) to $172M (2026 YTD) as deal volume and total upfront value rose, signaling China assets are no longer “cheap.”

🔹 Big AI-protein IPO, rough debut — Generate Biomedicines priced 25M shares at $16 to raise $400M to fund AI-designed protein medicines, led by two Phase 3 severe-asthma trials (~1,600 patients), although the stock fell ~21% after trading, valuing it at ~$1.61B (February 27th).

🔹 AI + in-vitro scale-up IQVIA will buy selected Charles River discovery assets for ~$145M (plus up to $10M), adding five in-vitro sites and a machine-learning small-molecule platform backed by 20+ years of data linked to 100+ clinical-trial molecules; closing Q2 2026.

🔹 No-code AI modeling for bench scientists — Tamarind Bio raised $13.6M Series A to scale a cloud platform used by ~100 biotechs (including “8 of the top 20 pharmas”) that lets lab teams run 200+ AI and simulation models for protein and small-molecule research without command-line or infrastructure setup.

🔹 Digital-cell models expand into immunology — Turbine raised $25M Series B to scale its AI “virtual cell” platform beyond oncology, launching an immunology collaboration with an undisclosed top-10 pharma and building on prior work with AstraZeneca, after supporting 30+ partner discovery programs.

🔹 Funding for organ-targeted gene delivery — BreezeBio raised $60M Series B to advance non-viral, tissue-targeted nanoparticle delivery and push its first genetic-medicine programs toward the clinic, starting with IND-enabling work in type 1 diabetes.

🔹 Recursion reported a $4M progress payment from Sanofi (total $134M to date) and $754M cash extending runway to early 2028, while saying the joint immunology-oncology small-molecule portfolio could grow to up to 15 programs. Separately, recent filings show NVIDIA sold its Recursion shares by Dec. 31, 2025 while ARK bought more.

🔹 Quantum-chemistry drug discovery funding — Ten63 Therapeutics raised $45M led by Chugai Venture Fund and the Gates Foundation to advance a quantum-chemistry-based small-molecule discovery model aimed at “undruggable” oncology targets, including MYC, starting with cervical cancer.

🔹 Record ALS research push — U.S. Congress approved a record $315M for ALS research in 2026.

🔹 AI deal for genetic epilepsy targets — Angelini Pharma struck a multiyear partnership with Quiver Bioscience worth up to $120M in milestones (plus royalties) to use AI-driven genomics and safety modeling to identify new therapies for rare pediatric genetic epilepsies.

🔹 DMD gene therapy launch in Japan — Sarepta’s Duchenne gene therapy began commercial sales in Japan (via Chugai/Roche) for ambulatory children 3 to <8 years, triggering a $40M milestone payment to Sarepta.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Pfizer and gene editing — Pfizer exercised its option for global rights to Beam’s liver-targeted in vivo base-editing program (from a $300M upfront collaboration with up to $1.05B milestones), while Beam also disclosed a $500M Sixth Street loan extending runway into mid-2029.

🔹 Big CAR-T buyout — Gilead agreed to buy Arcellx for $7.8B ($115/share + $5 CVR) to take full control of a BCMA CAR-T for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma under FDA review with a Dec. 23 decision date.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Organoid-informed gene therapy enters clinic — Mahzi Therapeutics dosed the first patient in a Phase 1/2 trial of an AAV9 gene-replacement therapy for Pitt Hopkins syndrome (TCF4 mutations), enrolling ~12 participants across five sites in the U.S., Israel, and Spain.

🔹 Protein degradation via polymer “bridges” — Northwestern researchers created protein-like polymers that bind hard-to-drug cancer drivers and recruit the cell’s disposal machinery to degrade them, showing selective target removal and tumor-growth slowing in mouse models.

🔹 Single-molecule proteomics debuts — Nautilus unveiled its Voyager benchtop at US HUPO 2026 to map up to 10B intact proteins/proteoforms per run.

🔹 Rett gene therapy fast-tracked — Neurogene’s one-time Rett syndrome gene therapy received FDA Breakthrough Therapy status based on interim Phase 1/2 functional improvements, with registrational trial dosing expected to finish in Q2 2026.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 FDA one-trial default draws caution — FDA made a single pivotal trial the default for approvals beyond oncology/rare disease, but experts warn the change may mostly shift discretion and increase sponsor risk without clearer guidance. See how this could affect AI-enabled evidence packages in our recent coverage “FDA Shifts Drug Approval Policy: What Does This Mean for AI-Enabled Therapies?”

🔹 AI pathology distribution in the EU — Epredia signed an EU distribution deal to add Mindpeak’s on-prem AI image-analysis modules to its digital pathology offering.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 AI-enabled brain health clinics — Salma Health launched with $80M Series A (Mubadala Capital and ARCH) to build an integrated U.S. network combining psychiatry/neurology care, FDA-regulated trials, and an AI care-coordination platform, starting with clinics in San Diego, Orange County, Fremont, and Berkeley.

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New AI-Native Biotechs: 2026 Watchlist

We’ve updated our AI-Native Biotechs Watchlist with fresh context on the FDA’s newly formalized “one pivotal trial” default and its explicit emphasis on mechanistic, real-world, and model-based “confirmative evidence” around that study. In the article’s framing, that shifts more weight onto things like validated biomarkers, external controls, real-world evidence, and computational work such as modeling, in-silico simulations, and synthetic comparators.

We scan a batch of newly launched startups built around those computational capabilities, spanning areas like RNA design, biomolecular modeling, regulatory DNA engineering, data imputation, lab automation, and structure-based drug discovery, with company-by-company notes on what each is building and what it reports so far.

AI-Native 2026 Watchlist

Why AI Won’t Automatically Accelerate Clinical Trials

Asimov Press just published a response to Dario Amodei’s “trials will take one year” speculation, arguing that better drug design does not automatically compress clinical trial timelines (Ruxandra Teslo with Asimov Press, Feb. 27, 2026). The piece separates two variables that often get blurred: whether a candidate works (trial success rate) versus how long it takes to run the experiment once it starts (trial speed).

It spends most of its time on why speed is bounded by things like recruitment, site operations, shipping logistics, regulator requirements, and biology itself, including the time it takes to observe endpoints.

The most concrete illustration is osteoporosis: despite a strong preclinical model (the ovariectomized rat) and high Phase III success reported as 83.7%, the author argues the field still struggles because Phase III trials tend to be enormous (10,000–16,000 participants), long (three to five years), and costly ($500M to $1B), largely due to fracture reduction being a slow, low-frequency endpoint.

The article also points to a 2015 oncology R&D analysis linking surrogate endpoint acceptance to investment patterns, and it frames better surrogate endpoints and regulatory process changes as the real levers, with AI helping “at the margins” via drafting, site selection, matching, and data workflows. It proposes a CTN-like approach (Australia’s Clinical Trial Notification framework) as an example of how early-phase work might move faster than the U.S. IND default, while still keeping safety oversight.

Read

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

Separately, a new benchtop sequencer announcement from San Diego kept the “falling sequencing costs” thread in view, which we framed in our recent ‘genomic watchpoints for 2026’.

We also saw a fresh Y Combinator entrant building an agentic drug platform on Google DeepMind’s Cell2Sentence single-cell foundation model, and compiled a short “New AI-Native Biotechs” list for a quick scan of new launches.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Insilico Medicine shared its new ACS Central Science “Prompt-to-Drug” paper, outlining a “pharmaceutical superintelligence” architecture that orchestrates agentic AI plus automated labs to turn simple prompts into drug candidates—positioned as a foundation for its $100M partnership with Lilly.

🔹 Deep Origin and Arctoris were selected for the UK ARIA AI Scientist program to build an AI-enabled autonomous scientist for endometriosis, combining Deep Origin’s computational drug discovery with Arctoris’ robotic lab to iteratively plan, run, and analyze experiments with minimal manual input.

🔹 Flatiron launched AI-powered prostate cancer datasets spanning ~400,000 patients across the US, UK, and Germany.

🔹 Integrated Biosciences added Tony Wu (xAI co-founder) to its Scientific Advisory Board to strengthen its optogenetics-chemistry-AI platform for discovering small-molecule therapies for age-related diseases.

🔹 UK-based Bioptic published a paper on an agentic AI system for drug asset scouting that analyzes scientific, regulatory, and corporate sources to flag partnership targets and competitive risks, and reports early pharma BD adoption with a public specialty therapeutics company using it for diligence and portfolio intelligence.

🔹 Tran et al. (Science, Feb 2026) introduced MULTI-evolve, a lab-in-the-loop ML method that uses protein language models plus targeted double-mutant testing to learn mutation interactions and quickly design stronger multi-mutation proteins, delivering big gains across APEX enzymes, dCasRx, and an anti-CD122 antibody in fewer iteration cycles than traditional directed evolution.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 PitchBook expects biopharma VC to keep recovering in 2026 (report PDF), but in a more cautious, selective way: money is concentrating into fewer, bigger rounds for more proven, later-stage drug assets rather than early platform bets (2025 deal value: $33.8B; median early-stage round: $27M, up 77%).

🔹 After announcing upcoming Phase 3 data from its psilocybin trials in treatment-resistant depression, Compass Pathways launched a proposed $150M public offering, with an option for underwriters to purchase up to an additional $22.5M.

🔹 Korsana Biosciences emerged from stealth with $175M raised to advance its brain-shuttle platform, including lead Alzheimer’s candidate KRSA-028, a shuttled anti-amyloid beta antibody partnered with Paragon Therapeutics, with plaque-clearance data expected in late 2027.

🔹 Innovacell, a Tokyo-based cell therapy company, plans to IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Feb. 24, 2026, aiming to raise about ¥14.17B (~$92M) to support its Phase 3 program and build manufacturing/commercial infrastructure.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Unnatural Products (UNP) signed a research collaboration and licensing deal with Novartis to develop AI-designed macrocyclic peptide therapeutics for historically “undruggable” targets (with potential cardiovascular applications), with UNP eligible for up to $100M upfront/pre-IND, up to $1.7B in milestones, plus tiered royalties.

🔹 BostonGene and Daiichi Sankyo struck a strategic collaboration to use AI-driven multimodal “digital twin” analytics (multi-omics + histopathology) to support precision ADC development.

🔹 Merck and Mayo Clinic formed an R&D collaboration to combine Mayo’s de-identified multimodal clinical/genomic data and platform tools with Merck’s AI/ML capabilities to accelerate AI-enabled drug discovery and precision medicine, initially focusing on IBD, atopic dermatitis, and multiple sclerosis.

🔹 GE HealthCare expanded its BARDA partnership by ~$35M to advance AI-powered ultrasound tools for faster trauma assessment and mass-casualty emergency care.

🔹 Scribe Therapeutics and Eli Lilly hit a second milestone in their multi-program in vivo CRISPR collaboration for neurological and neuromuscular disorders, powered by Scribe’s X-Editor (engineered CasX) platform; financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the 2023 deal includes $1.5B+ in potential milestones plus royalties.

🔹 Boehringer Ingelheim has stopped testing and dropped its inhaled gene therapy for cystic fibrosis after an early clinical trial didn’t show results strong enough to keep going, even though it appeared reasonably safe.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Ultima Genomics launched its UG200 Series DNA sequencers and Solaris 2.0 workflows ahead of AGBT today, claiming up to 2x more output and ~50% faster runs than UG100, with shipments starting Q2 2026 and a Solaris 2.0 Max chemistry later in 2026 targeting up to 20B reads per wafer.

🔹 San Diego-based Element Biosciences unveiled a benchtop DNA sequencer that can deliver a whole genome for $100 (allegedly ~half the cost of Illumina’s NovaSeq) intensifying competition as the two companies battle in court over antitrust and patent claims.

🔹 An FNIH Biomarkers Consortium study in Nature Medicine found a “clock model” using a single blood p-tau217 test can predict Alzheimer’s symptom onset about 3-4 years in advance, alongside a new web tool to visualize biomarker trajectories for improved trial planning.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 The FDA is shifting its default drug-approval standard to one well-controlled pivotal trial, with additional “confirmative evidence” (e.g., validated biomarkers, mechanistic data, and real-world evidence) expected to support the application.

🔹 The Pentagon briefly added major Chinese firms (including WuXi AppTec) to its Section 1260H “Chinese military companies” list ahead of an expected Trump-Xi summit, then withdrew the Federal Register filing without explanation, leaving the designations in limbo and adding fresh uncertainty to US-China tech tensions.

🔹 A study tested whether chatbots help beginners do key lab steps needed to make a virus; surprisingly, people with LLM access did not do better than those using the internet alone (about 5% vs ~7% completed all tasks). Forecasters (especially “superforecasters”) had expected a much bigger boost, and after seeing the results they slightly lowered their estimates of near-term biosecurity risk, while noting that a future big jump in AI lab help could still raise risk.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 CellType, a Yale University spinout, joined Y Combinator’s W26 (2026) batch to develop an agentic AI drug platform based on Google DeepMind's Cell2Sentence, a 27B-parameter single-cell foundation model that treats gene expression as a biological language to simulate human biology in silico.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

A few things worth prefacing with include Isomorphic Labs’ benchmarking of its drug design engine, Takeda’s multi-year AI drug discovery partnership with Iambic Therapeutics (note: last year, Iambic had early Phase 1 readouts for its AI-designed cancer drug), Generate:Biomedicines filing for an IPO, Lilly’s up to $2.4B Orna Therapeutics deal to enter in vivo CAR-T, and Sanofi’s fast-moving CEO change. To note—the launch of a new startup (backed by a16z/Menlo’s Anthology) and its “integrated biology environment” lab for running biomedical research.

We also had a new contribution piece from ICON plc on how digital health technologies are moving from pilots into core clinical development strategy, plus a short Women and Girls in Science Day roundup focused on prominent women working across the AI and life science stack.

For paid subscribers, we looked at the recent uptick in big pharma deals with China, and the prominence of advanced therapeutic modalities in recent headlines.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe now

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Isomorphic Labs benchmarked its IsoDDE “drug design engine,” claiming it goes beyond AlphaFold 3 by better generalizing on hard protein–ligand cases (incl. cryptic pockets/induced fit) plus stronger antibody-antigen modeling and binding-affinity prediction to help rank pockets and candidates for drug discovery.

🔹 Takeda signed a multi-year AI drug-discovery partnership with San Diego-based Iambic Therapeutics worth up to ~$1.7B in milestones to apply Iambic’s generative small-molecule platform across oncology, GI, and inflammation. Iambic also disclosed a new $20M investment from Ireland’s ISIF (on top of an oversubscribed $100M financing) as it plans to expand engineering hires there.

🔹 Ginkgo Bioworks + OpenAI say a GPT-5-driven autonomous lab ran 36,000 experiments and cut cell-free protein synthesis costs 40% (to ~$422/gram) in a new preprint.

🔹 Terray Therapeutics updated its diffusion-free TerraBind potency model, claiming ~26x faster and lower-cost inference than diffusion approaches (e.g., Boltz-2) while improving correlation to experimental binding data, building on its EMMI platform’s recent Bristol Myers Squibb milestone.

🔹 Insilico Medicine and China Medical System (CMS) teamed up on AI-driven drug discovery in CNS and autoimmune diseases, planning to co-develop at least two programs using Insilico’s Pharma.AI plus CMS’s clinical/regulatory/commercial expertise. Insilico is set to receive R&D funding of “several tens of millions” HKD per program.

🔹 Unlearn will supply AI “digital twin” external comparators for VectorY’s single-arm PIONEER-ALS Phase 1/2 trial of VTx-002, an AAV gene-delivered anti–TDP-43 antibody, to strengthen efficacy readouts where placebo controls are hard to run.

🔹 Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome authors (YouTube roundtable) explain their Nature-published DNA sequence-to-function model for decoding the 98% non-coding genome, released in June 2025, highlighting long-context (up to ~1M bp) high-resolution TPU breakthroughs and an API to rapidly score variant effects for disease research.

🔹 San Francisco-based Tahoe Therapeutics says it’s building the largest single-cell atlas of cell-chemical interactions by combining INTEGRA automated pipetting with Parse Biosciences’ scRNA-seq and its own AI.

🔹 In Nature Medicine, researchers introduce SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model trained on ~585,000 hours of polysomnography from 65,000+ people that can predict future risk for 130 diseases from a single night (e.g., mortality C-index 0.84, dementia 0.85, MI 0.81).

🔹 Anthropic partnered with HHMI (Janelia/AI@HHMI) and the Allen Institute to embed Claude-powered agents into lab workflows for experiment interpretation, hypothesis generation, and multimodal/omics analysis, with real-world feedback guiding future Claude research versions.

🔹 Inductive Bio won the OpenADMET-ExpansionRx blind challenge with its Beacon ML models, topping 370+ submissions by predicting nine ADMET endpoints on unseen compounds from real discovery programs.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

💰 QuantX Biosciences closes an oversubscribed $85M Series B co-led by LAV and Sanofi Ventures to push its oral STAT6 and IL-17 small-molecule inhibitors toward the clinic, powered by a computational discovery platform that blends physics-based modeling, statistical/AI methods, and high-performance computing to design and optimize drug candidates.

🔹 Pfizer joins Basel-based BaseLaunch as its 7th pharma partner, expanding the incubator’s support network for early-stage biotech creation through Series A. BaseLaunch says its 27 portfolio companies have raised $1B+ collectively, with several already in Phase II.

🔹 Biotech IPOs look to be thawing in early 2026 (e.g., Aktis $318M, Eikon $381M, Agomab $200M), with PitchBook-linked estimates pointing to ~30–35 biotech IPOs in 2026 vs 11 in 2025 as investors favor clinical-stage/product-led stories.

🔹 Colossal Biosciences struck a “nine-figure deal” with the UAE to build a Dubai BioVault and lab at the Museum of the Future, aiming to store genetic material from 10,000+ species (millions of samples) as part of a planned global network of biodiversity “backup” vaults.

🔹 Flagship’s Generate:Biomedicines (an AI/ML-driven protein + antibody design company) filed to pursue an IPO to fund Phase 3 severe-asthma studies of its long-acting anti-TSLP antibody GB-0895.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Lilly is buying Massachusetts-based Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4B to enter in vivo CAR-T, using Orna’s circular RNA + lipid nanoparticle platform led by CD19 program ORN-252 for B-cell autoimmune diseases.

🔹 Sanofi is replacing CEO Paul Hudson with Merck KGaA CEO Belén Garijo (interim CEO Olivier Charmeil from Feb 17; Garijo starts Apr 29).

🔹 FDA refused to file Moderna’s mRNA flu shot application over trial design/comparator concerns, and Moderna publicly pushed back while warning it could complicate its combo flu-COVID plans.

🔹 Google DeepMind says Gemini Deep Think plus an agentic “verifier-reviser” workflow (Aletheia) can tackle research-level math/CS/physics problems—reporting progress from IMO/ICPC-level results to papers and case studies where the system iteratively checks, fixes, and sometimes refutes conjectures using literature/web-assisted reasoning.

🧬 Gene Therapy Lane

In vivo cell/gene therapy was a major theme at Advanced Therapies Week in San Diego, with speakers citing easier access vs ex vivo (potentially avoiding lymphodepleting chemo) and pointing to momentum from deals like Lilly’s $2.4B Orna buy and Regeneron-Tessera, though many cautioned investment is running ahead of human data.

Negatives

➖ FDA put Regenxbio’s MPS I (RGX-111) and MPS II/Hunter (RGX-121) gene therapy trials on hold after a child developed a brain tumor found on MRI 4 years post-dose (preliminarily linked to AAV integration/PLAG1 overexpression). The agency also sent a Feb 7 CRL for RGX-121, citing trial design/external control and surrogate endpoint concerns and asking for more/longer controlled data.

➖ Lilly dropped three clinical-stage programs, including Prevail’s GRN gene therapy for frontotemporal dementia for lack of efficacy.

➖ uniQure paused dosing of its AAV gene therapy in the mid- and high-dose cohorts after two patients had asymptomatic Grade 3 liver enzyme elevations that improved with steroids.

Positives

➕ Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics expect Casgevy to ramp in 2026, projecting ~3x higher sales as more patients move through the infusion pipeline and insurance coverage reaches ~90% of eligible U.S. patients.

➕ Madrigal licensed six preclinical liver-targeted siRNA programs for MASH from China’s Ribo Life Science (and Sweden’s Ribocure) for $60M upfront plus up to $4.4B in milestones, aiming to pair gene-silencing therapies with its THR-β drug Rezdiffra.

➕ Ultragenyx reported UX111 gene therapy shows sustained cognitive/functional benefits in Sanfilippo A with up to ~8.5 years follow-up across two studies, and the company resubmitted its FDA application (previously CRL’d on CMC/manufacturing issues) expecting a ~6-month review.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Northwestern researchers built an advanced human spinal cord organoid injury model and showed their “dancing molecules” supramolecular therapy boosted neurite outgrowth and reduced glial scarring in injured organoids, supporting its translational potential after prior paralysis-reversal results in animals.

🔹 SK bioscience began a Phase 1/2 trial in Australia of GBP511, a UW Institute for Protein Design nanoparticle vaccine that displays pieces of four coronaviruses to target sarbecoviruses (incl. COVID-19), backed by ~$65M from CEPI.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Next-gen obesity drugs like Novo Nordisk’s CagriSema and Lilly’s triple-agonist retatrutide are showing ~23–30% weight loss in trials—potentially beating Wegovy/Zepbound—but clinicians warn “too much, too fast” loss may raise risks like gallstones and muscle loss.

🔹 The U.S. Department of Energy launched the Genesis Mission Consortium, a public-private partnership to speed AI-driven scientific discovery via working groups on AI models, data standards, HPC/cloud, and robotics/automation, administered by TechWerx (RTI).

🔹 HHS/BARDA and VITAL launched a $100M SMART Prize to spur broad-spectrum small-molecule antivirals for Togaviridae/Flaviviridae viruses (e.g., dengue, Zika, West Nile, chikungunya), with submissions due May 11, 2026.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 Stanford spinout Phylo launched with a $13.5M seed round (a16z + Menlo’s Anthology, with Anthropic) and unveiled Biomni Lab, an “Integrated Biology Environment” that uses agentic AI to run biomedical research workflows across connected tools and databases.

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Women and Girls in Science Day, Seen Through the AI-Life Science Stack

For February 11, the UN-designated International Day of Women and Girls in Science, themed «Synergizing AI, Social Science, STEM and Finance», we put together a quick, tech-forward roundup of women working across the AI and life science interface, spanning research, product-building, and capital decisions.

Featured: Daphne Koller (Founder and CEO, insitro), Alice Zhang (Founder and CEO, Verge Genomics), Suchi Saria (Founder, Bayesian Health; Director, Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab, Johns Hopkins), Regina Barzilay (Professor, MIT CSAIL; AI faculty lead, MIT Jameel Clinic), Jen Asher, Ph.D. (Founder and CEO, 1910 Genetics).

Also: Dr. Najat Khan, PhD (CEO and President, Recursion), Michelle Lee (Founder and CEO, Medra), Dr. Charlotte Bunne (EPFL), Dr. Effy Vayena (ETH Zurich), Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi (MIT), Dr. Emma Pierson (UC Berkeley), Dr. Finale Doshi Velez (Harvard).

These names are by no means exhaustive and many other women are shaping how AI enters biology and medicine in equally substantive ways. We hope this serves as a small acknowledgment of that work and as encouragement for more women to lead in the sciences.

Company Watchlist: AI for De-Risking Clinical Trials

Clinical development still runs into an asymmetry of only around one in ten drug candidates that enter human testing reaching approval, and Phase II and III failures account for a lot of wasted R&D spend. In this watchlist, we look at AI’s attempt to use more of the signal that existing de-risking methods can leave on the table.

We profiled a few companies to watch in 2026 across three layers of this “de-risking” stack:

• how studies are designed

• how control evidence is assembled

• how trials are run and analyzed operationally

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ICON plc on Digital health Tech in Clinical Development

This contribution piece from ICON plc authors Caprice Sassano and Keith Thomas argues that digital health technologies (DHTs) are moving from pilots into core trial strategy, in a context of rising costs and increasingly complex timelines. The authors link that shift to regulators encouraging patient-centric designs and real-world data, and they frame the practical question as less “if” and more “how” DHTs get integrated.

Their concrete example is SV95C, stride velocity 95th centile, described as the first wearable-derived primary digital endpoint used in Duchenne muscular dystrophy trials, captured with an ankle-worn sensor. The authors contrast this with the six-minute walk test as a point-in-time clinic assessment, and they point to the EMA’s 2023 acceptance of SV95C as a milestone for digital endpoints.

Read

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

On the tech side, DeepMind’s AlphaGenome, an AI model built to read long stretches of DNA and predict how even single-letter changes may affect gene regulation, moved into the peer-reviewed record with a Nature publication.

Also, a joint report involving 14 pharma companies offered a snapshot of where generative AI is already being used in R&D, highlighting what governance and validation questions are still unresolved. Market-wise, there were early signs of thawing sentiment in the UK, with some biotechs reportedly reopening the IPO conversation and pointing to Nasdaq as a 2026 target.

Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 DeepMind’s AlphaGenome now peer-reviewed in Nature — first unveiled in June 2025, AlphaGenome is now published, reporting its ability to predict regulatory effects of non-coding variants across long DNA regions, aiding rare disease research and synthetic DNA design.

🔬 Japanese Chugai discontinued its only AI-optimized antibody after Phase 1, but reaffirmed confidence in its in-house Malexa platform, aiming to embed AI across discovery and operations.

🔹 Digital health tech moves from pilot to core — In a new ICON article on our main website, Caprice Sassano and Keith Thomas explore how digital health technologies—like wearables and sensors—are reshaping clinical trials, offering faster timelines, richer real-world data, and growing regulatory acceptance of digital endpoints.

🔹 Pharma roundtable assesses GenAI in R&D — A joint report in Science Direct from 14 pharmaceutical companies outlines current uses of generative AI in research and development, including document drafting and statistical programming, and examines future directions, governance, and validation needs.

🔹 AI boosts cancer detection while reducing workload — In a Swedish trial of ~100,000 women, combining AI with one radiologist improved breast cancer screening by detecting ~29% more cancers and reducing reading workload by ~44%, with similar false-positive rates and fewer aggressive interval cancers after 2 years.

🔹 AI modeling targets early kidney disease — BioMed X and the Barbados government launched a project to model early diabetic kidney disease using deep molecular profiling and AI, aiming to build a population-specific digital African twin to improve biomarker discovery and personalized care.

🔹 Unlearn debuts AI workspace for clinical trial planning — releasing a new AI tool to streamline early trial design by linking precedent data, benchmarks, and simulations in a single workflow to support faster, evidence-based decision-making.

🔹 Simplified AI pipeline wins protein binder design challenge — a 180-line method using Boltz-2 loss and unified folding/ranking reportedly outperformed traditional multi-stage workflows in the Adaptyv Nipah binder competition, suggesting simpler.

🔹 AI-ready proteomics targets Parkinson’s protein — Nautilus, Weill Cornell–Qatar, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation launched a $1.6M program to develop a single-molecule assay for alpha-synuclein proteoforms to improve early diagnosis and treatment of PD.

🔹 Oath Surgical partners with Nvidia to power AI-driven surgery centers — Oath Surgical will use Nvidia’s AI infrastructure to enhance its outpatient surgery platform, enabling real-time analysis of surgical data and automating documentation across its growing network of ambulatory centers.

🔹 AI accelerates CRISPR control — Researchers from Monash and Melbourne used AI to design synthetic anti-CRISPR proteins that rapidly and precisely inhibit Cas13a activity.

🔹 NVIDIA and Innophore launched CavitOmiX, an AI platform predicting drug interactions and repurposing opportunities at scale.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Biopharma M&A shifts toward platforms and vertical integration — Bain’s 2026 report highlights four trends reshaping pharma dealmaking: focus on owning the value chain, next-gen obesity drugs, ADC-driven oncology deals, and strategic alliances with China’s maturing pharma pipeline.

🔹 AstraZeneca signs $18.5B obesity drug deal with China’s CSPC — One day after pledging $15B in China by 2030, AstraZeneca agreed to pay CSPC $1.2B upfront and up to $17.3B in milestones for ex-China rights to eight obesity drug programs, following a separate $5.3B AI-driven drug discovery deal in 2025.

🔹 Eli Lilly has teamed up with Seamless Therapeutics to develop gene therapies using recombinase enzymes, aiming for precise gene insertion without CRISPR, marking a major step in post-CRISPR editing strategies.

🔹 Insilico signs $120M cardiometabolic drug deal with Qilu Pharma — Insilico will apply its Pharma.AI platform to design small molecules, while Qilu leads development and commercialization; also, Insilico nominated AI-designed GIPR antagonist for obesity as a preclinical candidate.

🔹 AI-native Formation Bio licenses drug from China — Formation Bio acquired ex-Greater China rights to a miR-124-targeting small molecule from Jiangsu Chia Tai Feng Hai, aiming to rival Abivax in inflammation, with a Phase 1 trial planned for 2026 and up to $500M in milestones.

🔹 UK-based Automata raised $45M in Series C and formed a strategic partnership with Danaher to scale its AI-native lab automation platform

🔹 Flagship Pioneering’s Repertoire Immune Medicines signed a partnership with Eli Lilly worth up to $1.9B to develop targeted autoimmune therapies using its immune mapping platform, joining earlier deals with BMS, Genentech, and Pfizer.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Sanofi drops mRNA seasonal flu vaccine program citing strategic refocus, though it remains committed to mRNA for pandemic strains and continues to grow its vaccine business with recent acquisitions.

🔹 Merck ends $30B acquisition talks with Revolution Medicines after failing to agree on price, though future talks or competing bids remain possible as key trial data is expected this year.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 FDA greenlights first human trial of epigenetic reprogramming — Life Biosciences, co-founded by David Sinclair, received FDA approval to test a gene therapy aiming to partially reset the epigenome in patients with vision loss, marking a major milestone for the longevity field.

🔹 Organoid models in rare disease research — iXCells and Rosebud Biosciences partnered to integrate AI-driven organoid platforms with iPSC technology.

🔹 Synthetic phages engineered to fight superbugs — NEB and Yale developed a fully synthetic system to create bacteriophages targeting drug-resistant P. aeruginosa, streamlining customization and accelerating therapeutic development using Golden Gate Assembly.

🔹 Organoids reveal shared autism pathways — Using brain organoids from 70 patient-derived stem cell lines, UCLA and Stanford researchers showed that diverse autism-linked mutations converge on common molecular pathways during early brain development, highlighting potential targets for future therapies.

🔹 Chinese startup launches noninvasive brain-computer interface using ultrasound — Gestala aims to treat conditions like chronic pain and depression by stimulating the brain with focused ultrasound, eventually developing wearable devices to both read and modulate brain activity without implants.

🔹 Soft 3D transistors mimic neural tissue for bioelectronics — Researchers at the University of Hong Kong developed the first soft, 3D hydrogel-based transistors capable of hosting living cells, offering a breakthrough in integrating electronics with biological systems for future medical and neurotechnology applications.

🔹 Neuralink expands BCI trials to 21 participants — Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, Telepathy, is now being tested by 21 people with paralysis, enabling thought-based control of cursors, robotic arms, and typing up to 40 WPM, as the company prepares hardware upgrades and broader clinical rollout.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 British biotechs are showing renewed interest in public listings, with some eyeing Nasdaq in 2026 after a years-long IPO freeze, driven by strong M&A, rising investor optimism, and supportive policy shifts.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

On the healthcare AI side, OpenEvidence, with its “ChatGPT for doctors”, raised again and is now being priced around a $12B valuation. In Europe, against a tense global backdrop at Davos, Ursula von der Leyen announced “EU-Inc.” as a push toward a single, digital-first company setup across member states, a corporate-structure project that founder and investor groups have been publicly pushing since 2024.

AI drug developer Insilico Medicine got another FDA IND for a brain-penetrant NLRP3 program, also rolling out “Science MMAI Gym,” a training and evaluation framework it says can tune general LLMs for pharma R&D, pitched as a membership offering for external partners. A bit earlier, another gen-AI drugmaker Absci released an antibody design model built to iterate with rapid wet-lab feedback.

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Isomorphic Labs and J&J join forces on AI drug discovery — Alphabet-backed Isomorphic Labs partnered with Johnson & Johnson to apply AI to multi-modality drug design, targeting hard-to-drug diseases. Isomorphic now expects to begin human trials of its AI-designed drugs by the end of 2026, a year later than previously planned.

🧬 Basecamp Research reportedly achieves programmable gene insertion — In a preprint, the UK-based biotech describes an AI model, EDEN, developed with Nvidia and trained on 9.7T biological tokens, that enables targeted insertion of large DNA sequences into the human genome. The team reports lab data showing >90% tumor clearance using CAR T cells modified with this approach, and high success rates designing novel antimicrobial peptides. EDEN is presented as a potential advance beyond current CRISPR-based editing limits.

🔹 Insilico Medicine expands AI drug discovery push with $66M CNS deal and new LLM training platform — Insilico partnered with Hygtia to co-develop an AI-designed brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitor for neurodegenerative diseases, while also launching Science MMAI Gym to transform general LLMs into pharma-grade scientific engines.

🔹 Recently, Absci debuted new antibody design model, targeting hard-to-drug proteins — Absci launched Origin-1, a protein design model using rapid wet-lab validation to tackle elusive targets like GPCRs, with clinical trials underway for hair loss and endometriosis and a two-year, low-cost development cycle.

🔹 Europe launches €60M LIGAND-AI project for drug discovery — a 5-year, EU-funded initiative led by UCL, Pfizer, and the Structural Genomics Consortium brings together 18 partners across 9 countries to advance AI-driven drug design.

🔹 Tempus launches AI tool to guide cancer test decisions — Following its $81M acquisition of Paige AI, Tempus unveiled Paige Predict, an AI-powered pathology tool that analyzes tissue slides to predict biomarker presence, optimizing molecular test selection across 16 cancer types.

🔹 Lantern Pharma received its third orphan designation for LP-284, this time for soft tissue sarcomas, expanding its AI-driven oncology pipeline targeting DNA repair deficiencies in rare and aggressive cancers.

🔹 Following its $200M Series C early this year, Soley Therapeutics published research introducing its “Live Cell Dynamics” platform—a machine learning-powered, label-free imaging approach that captures how cells dynamically respond to drug stress over time.

🔹 SF-based Elucidata launches AI Lab to tackle edge-case failures in biomedical AI — Aiming to address out-of-distribution data issues in drug discovery and diagnostics, Elucidata’s new AI Lab will develop tools to detect and operationalize rare biological signals.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 “ChatGPT for doctors” raises $250M at $12B valuation — OpenEvidence secured a $250M Series D to expand its AI-powered medical search engine, now used in over 10,000 U.S. care centers and supporting 18M monthly consultations by 40% of physicians.

🔹 UK backs autonomous lab research — The UK’s ARIA agency awarded ~£500K each to 12 teams (incl. Lila Sciences) to develop AI scientists that can autonomously design, run, and analyze lab experiments.

🔹 BIOMAKERS raises $8M to scale AI oncology platform — The San Francisco company secured funding to expand its AI-driven precision oncology infrastructure and clinical-genomic dataset across 20+ countries, supporting drug and diagnostic development.

🔹 Florida-based Neuropacs secured over $1M in seed funding to expand its MRI-based AI platform for diagnosing Parkinson’s and related disorders, aiming for broader clinical adoption.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Aspect Biosystems and Novo Nordisk expand partnership for 3D-printed diabetes implants — Vancouver-based Aspect gained access to Novo’s stem cell and immune-shielding tech to develop implantable pancreatic tissue, advancing a potential type 1 diabetes cure using its AI-driven bioprinting platform.

🔹 Scribe Therapeutics to trial one-time CRISPR therapy for high cholesterol — will begin Phase 1 trials in mid-2026 for a gene-silencing therapy targeting PCSK9, aiming to durably lower LDL cholesterol without cutting DNA.

🔹 Biomimetic brain model matching animal learning — MIT, Dartmouth, and Stony Brook researchers built a biologically realistic digital brain model that learned a visual task like lab animals and uncovered overlooked neurons tied to errors, offering a new tool for understanding cognition and testing neurotherapeutics.

🔹 Teitur to use NeuraLight’s digital biomarkers in Parkinson’s trial — Teitur will integrate NeuraLight’s eye-movement-based brain function measures, powered by computer vision and neural signal analysis, to track drug impact on neural circuits in its upcoming TT-P34 trial.

🔹 Gut neurons and epithelial cells team up to drive immunity — New research in Nature shows TRPV1+ sensory neurons activate tuft cells to trigger parasite expulsion and tissue remodeling, revealing a neuroimmune circuit uncovered by Weill Cornell and Allen Institute researchers.

🔹 a16z: Genetic ‘Surgery’ May Need New Rules — In a case likened to a medical moonshot, a baby with a rare mutation was cured using a bespoke gene-editing therapy tailored to his DNA. a16z’s Jorge Conde argues for a new regulatory framework, akin to CLIA labs for diagnostics, that treats such precision genetic interventions as customizable procedures, not one-size-fits-all products, to unlock access for ultra-rare disease patients.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Von der Leyen announced ‘EU-Inc.’ to unify startup rules across Europe — At Davos, the European Commission unveiled EU-Inc., a long-awaited initiative to create a single, digital-first corporate structure enabling companies to register in 48 hours and scale across borders, aiming to close the tech gap with the U.S. and China.

🔹 EU launches FAST‑EU pilot to speed up clinical trial approvals — Starting 30 January 2026, the initiative will streamline multi-national trial assessments as part of broader EU efforts to strengthen clinical research and prepare for the upcoming EU Biotech Act.

🔹 FDA and EMA align on AI standards in drug development — U.S. and European regulators issued joint guidance on responsible AI use across the drug lifecycle, emphasizing data integrity, traceability, and auditability, especially in manufacturing and quality oversight.

🔹 FDA proposes new pathway for individualized genetic therapies — a multi-author editorial in Molecular Therapy supports the FDA’s proposed framework for customized genetic treatments, advocating for standardized, platform-based development of therapies like ASOs and gene editors to treat ultra-rare mutations, with shared data infrastructure to accelerate collective learning.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI revives stalled drug program — Takeda is embedding AI across drug discovery after Boston AI partner Nabla helped rescue a failing preclinical antibody.

🔹 ByteDance challenges AlphaFold with new protein folding model — The TikTok maker’s SeedFold builds on AlphaFold 3 and sets new benchmarks on FoldBench, inheriting an AlphaFold3-style architecture while widening the Pairformer and introducing linear triangular attention.

🔹 Tahoe Therapeutics, Arc Institute, and Chan/Zuckerberg’s Biohub have partnered to create the largest open dataset for virtual cell modeling, combining 120M single-cell profiles and 225K drug-patient perturbations for AI models of cellular behavior and treatment response.

🔹 Recursive Language Models reframe AI reasoning limits — Bo Wang (Xaira Therapeutics, UHN) highlights how Recursive Language Models (RLMs) challenge the belief that long-context AI reasoning is just a memory problem, instead enabling scalable, structured thinking by programmatically decomposing tasks rather than ingesting more data (an approach his team is testing in clinical trial applications).

🔹 Industrializing tissue replacement — Cambridge-based Cellino and Polyphron partner to combine AI-driven iPSC manufacturing with autonomous tissue engineering to scale personalized regenerative therapies through end-to-end, reproducible production systems.

🔹 Natera partners with NVIDIA to train large-scale foundation models on longitudinal oncology datasets for improved diagnostics, immunotherapy prediction, and biomarker discovery with high-performance AI infrastructure.

🔹 Leadership moves in AI-Driven biotech — Novo Nordisk appointed Anja Leth Zimmer as its first Chief AI Officer; BioMarin named Arpit Davé as Chief Digital and Information Officer, and Rune Labs tapped former Tempus executive Amy Gordon Franzen as CEO to lead expansion of its AI neurology platform.

🔹 CytoReason launches LINA, an NVIDIA-powered AI agent built on computational disease models to generate reproducible analyses and insights.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Google expands medical AI suite with imaging and speech models — releasing MedGemma 1.5 for high-dimensional medical imaging and MedASR for speech recognition, alongside a $100K Kaggle hackathon centered on open-source clinical AI development.

🔹 Pfizer taps SF-based Gordian Bio’s in vivo and ML platform for obesity targets — to screen gene targets in visceral fat using its in vivo mosaic platform and Pythia machine learning engine to identify therapeutic interventions for obesity with tissue-specific precision.

🔹 BMS taps Immunai’s AI to decode immune responses — Bristol Myers Squibb partners with US-based Immunai to analyze clinical trial data using its AI-powered immune atlas; Immunai now provides free single-cell multi-omic profiling to Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

🔹 Illumina launches Billion Cell Atlas for AI drug discovery — launching the first phase of a 5-billion-cell CRISPR perturbation dataset, partnering with AstraZeneca, Merck, and Eli Lilly to train AI models and validate genetic drug targets across hard-to-treat diseases.

🔹 Insilico Medicine brings AI drug discovery model to Microsoft platform — integrating its Nach01 foundation model with Microsoft Discovery to enable scalable, AI-native workflows for molecular design and predictive analysis in drug discovery.

🔹 JPM 2026: CEOs of Novo Nordisk, BMS, and Pfizer lay out their bets — Novo Nordisk’s Mike Doustdar called 2026 a “year of price pressure,” citing the Trump administration’s GLP-1 pricing deal and growing competition. Bristol Myers Squibb’s Chris Boerner previewed 10 potential product launches by 2030, with 11 key readouts expected this year. Pfizer’s Albert Bourla reaffirmed the company is “all in on obesity,” with 10 late-stage trials planned for Metsera assets and strong expectations from the growing cash-pay market.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Nearly $1B in new biotech VC funds launch globally — Andreessen Horowitz commits $700M to U.S. biotech innovation with a focus on AI applications, while Germany’s BioNTech and Penn back a $50M fund for Pennsylvania startups, and France’s Servier launches a €200M fund targeting European oncology and neurology firms.

🔹 Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation will invest ~$856M over nine years into BioInnovation Institute to expand life sciences and AI-driven startups across Europe, scaling its support beyond Denmark and into quantum and reproductive health.

🔹 AstraZeneca acquires Boston’s Modella AI to embed foundation models and AI agents across its global cancer pipeline for biomarker discovery, pathology analysis, and trial design through multimodal data integration.

🔹 OpenAI acquires health records startup Torch for reported $100M — Torch built a “medical memory” that unifies fragmented health data for AI use. Its four-person team joins OpenAI to support ChatGPT Health, a new initiative aimed at helping users analyze and manage personal health through the chatbot.

🔹 Nuclera extends Series C to $87M for antibody engineering platform — UK- and US-based company raises an additional $12M to expand its eProtein Discovery system with full-format antibody expression and validation, aiming to generate high-quality datasets for AI-driven biologics discovery.

🔹 $80M for AI-driven protein interaction drugs — New York-based Proxima raises $80M to develop proximity-based medicines using generative AI and structural proteomics to design small molecules that modulate protein-protein interactions; backed by DCVC, Nvidia, and Roivant.

🔹 Boston/Tel Aviv-based Converge Bio raises $25M to expand generative AI systems trained on DNA, RNA, and protein sequences, enabling pharma clients to design antibodies and optimize protein yield with integrated predictive and physics-based validation.

🔹 Juvena Therapeutics secures $33.5M Series B to progress its tissue-restorative biologics pipeline and AI discovery platform, backed by Bison Ventures, Eli Lilly, and others, amid ongoing Phase 1 trials for muscle regeneration.

🔹 $50M to scale human cell programming — UK-based bit.bio secures $50M Series C to expand its ioCells platform for drug discovery and toxicology, generating AI-ready human cell data to reduce animal testing and improve preclinical model accuracy.

🔹 Lux Capital raises $1.5B for frontier tech and AI — NY-based Lux Capital closes its largest fund to date amid a weak VC market, doubling down on AI, defense, and deep tech after early wins with Anduril, Hugging Face, and Recursion, and Auris Health, which sold to J&J for up to $6B.

🔹 UK-based Allos secures $5M to apply Causal AI to the redesign of hard-to-genericize small-molecule drugs.

🔹 Avenue Biosciences secures $5.7M to scale its AI-enabled platform that modulates the secretory pathway using engineered signal peptides, improving yield and manufacturability of complex therapeutic proteins.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 MIT spotlights biotech’s leap into personalized and regenerative medicine — In its Ten Breakthrough Technologies (2026), MIT Technology Review highlights advances like personalized base editing in infants, embryo genetic scoring, and gene “resurrection,” signaling a shift toward bespoke gene therapies, AI-integrated biology, and deeper manipulation of human development and disease.

🔹 Vascularized retinal organoids achieve full light-signal transmission. Researchers at University Hospital Bonn and partners integrated endothelial cells into retinal organoids, enabling nutrient flow, boosting ganglion cell survival, and—for the first time—establishing functional light pathways from photoreceptors to optic nerve cells in vitro.

🔹 CurifyLabs debuts 3D printer for scalable drug compounding that enables faster, modular preparation of personalized medicines in pharmacies

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 China’s biotech VC diverges on exits, incentives, and scale — a new BridgeCross Bio piece dissects how China’s life science venture ecosystem differs from the West, drawing on perspectives from firms like Sofinnova Partners, Sunstone Life Science Ventures, Apricot Capital, and a top Chinese VC; key themes include RMB fund dominance, founder resistance to M&A, and why Western VCs remain cautious despite China’s speed and scale.

🔹 Big Pharma eyes M&A surge as patents expire. With nearly $180B in drug revenues set to go off patent by 2028, major pharma companies are ramping up dealmaking, fueled by regulatory clarity, surging biotech stocks, and pressure to replenish pipelines, setting the stage for a wave of large-scale acquisitions in 2026.

🔹 JPM shifts from megadeals to meetings — Despite no major announcements, the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference remained packed with biopharma networking, as companies increasingly drop news before the event or pivot toward smaller conferences, possibly reflecting a broader evolution in how and where the industry communicates.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 Merge Labs emerges with $252M to develop non-invasive brain-computer interfaces — Backed by OpenAI, Bain Capital, and Gabe Newell, the startup is building ultrasound-based neurotechnology as an alternative to implanted BCIs. A spinoff from Forest Neurotech, Merge aims to interpret and modulate brain activity via blood flow dynamics, with AI foundation models aiding in signal interpretation.

🔹 Tahoe Therapeutics and Alloy Therapeutics form a new company to develop antibody-drug conjugates targeting novel tumor antigens discovered via Tahoe’s AI-powered single-cell platform, combining target discovery with Alloy’s ADC engineering and venture creation infrastructure (namely, 82VS).

Reality Check on AI Antibody Design

We recently read a head-to-head analysis comparing several of the current de novo antibody design models: Nabla Bio’s JAM-2, Chai Discovery’s Chai-2, Absci’s Origin-1 (built on Boltz), and the Baker Lab’s RFAntibody.

Traditional antibody discovery still largely means immunizing mice, waiting for an immune response, generating hybridomas, and screening thousands of candidates. That process typically takes 12–24 months, and many programs never produce a viable lead.

In short, JAM-2 and Chai-2 come out ahead overall, with relatively small differences between them. JAM-2 looks stronger on reported hit rates and affinities across many targets, while Chai-2 stands out on structural validation and target breadth. But the more interesting point is how much better all of these systems look compared with what was considered state of the art roughly a year ago, both in speed and in the likelihood of getting binders at all.

There is particular emphasis on GPCRs, which account for about 34% of approved drugs but are almost exclusively targeted by small molecules rather than antibodies. JAM-2 reports low-nanomolar binding to CXCR4, but Chai-2 reports a CXCR4 antibody with measurable agonist activity based on downstream signaling assays—“to design an antibody that not only finds its target but also induces a specific functional response represents capability that simply didn’t exist before.”

Highlights

• Hit rates at 39%

• Weeks-long timelines vs 12-24 months traditionally

• AI-designed antibody with GPCR-activating activity (a first)

• KRAS mutant discrimination at the single-amino acid level

That said, the analysis is explicit about the limits of what’s been shown so far:

• No in vivo data. None of the platforms report mouse PK, xenograft studies, or other in vivo proof of concept.

• Immunogenicity remains untested. The designed CDRs are novel, and anti-drug antibody risk is unknown. Clinical data is still years away.

• Manufacturing is unvalidated. There is no public evidence yet of large-scale CHO production for these designs.

• Access is limited. JAM-2, Chai-2, and Origin-1 are proprietary, while RFAntibody is open but requires thousands of designs per target.

• Hit rate does not equal a drug. Affinity maturation, epitope tuning, and format engineering remain largely downstream work.

The expectation is that the next meaningful milestones are in vivo data and IND-enabling work, rather than further gains in raw hit rates. At least one group signals that those steps may be approaching, but for now that’s still prospective.

How AI Brings Drug Testing Closer to Human Biology

In her latest column on rare diseases at BiopharmaTrend, our regular contributor Louise von Stechow, PhD, examines how drug testing is gradually shifting away from animal models toward more human-relevant, technology-driven approaches, with AI playing an increasingly visible role. Drawing on examples from toxicology, ADME, and disease modeling, she outlines why animal studies often fall short in predicting human outcomes, particularly in rare and multisystem disorders where suitable models are limited or absent.

Advanced human cell systems, organoids, and organ- and patient-on-chip platforms can capture patient-specific biology, but remain labor-intensive and reductionist. AI models are increasingly layered on top of these systems and historical clinical data to scale predictions, flag toxicity risks such as liver or cardiac injury, and support ADME and dose modeling in ways that are difficult to achieve with animal studies alone.

Von Stechow situates these technical developments in a changing regulatory and industrial context, where agencies in the US and EU are beginning to accept non-animal methods in defined settings, and both public initiatives and biotech companies are investing in computational and hybrid alternatives to traditional preclinical testing. The overall picture is one of incremental change, with AI and human-based models used to focus animal studies where they are most informative.

The full column, with detailed case studies and examples, is available on our website here.

2026 Biotech & Clinical AI Reports

Two reads that came across our desk recently: one is Benchling’s 2026 Biotech AI Report, which is based on data from 100 biotech and biopharma organizations already using AI in R&D and is trying to separate “daily driver” use cases from the stuff that still stalls out on data and workflow friction. The other is ARISE’s State of Clinical AI Report 2026, positioned as an annual synthesis of what is holding up in real clinical settings and what is not, with an emphasis on evaluation quality.

Benchling: 2026 Biotech AI Report

Benchling posits this as a November 2025 survey of about 100 biotech and pharma orgs actively using AI in R&D, and explicitly says it is not meant to represent “general industry sentiment,” but a view into AI front-runners in the U.S. and Europe.

A few takeaways:

• The earliest “wins” are workflow-native use cases with data that is comparatively clean and easy to sanity-check. They call out literature review (76% adoption), protein structure prediction (71%), scientific reporting (66%), and target identification (58%).

• Adoption drops in more complex, regulated, or harder-to-validate domains like generative design, biomarker analysis, and ADME. The report points to data being scattered, incomplete, and hard to validate as a core limiter.

• Their “planned growth” list leans toward more integrated systems, including workflow orchestration, manufacturing optimization, multimodal models, and “co-scientists.”

• They claim AI is becoming a default interface for scientists, reporting 89% using copilots or reasoning tools as a first stop for interrogating and synthesizing data.

• On org design, they report internal upskilling as the top talent source (67%), versus hiring from tech (21%).

• On impact, they report that 50% “report faster time-to-target today” and 56% “expect cost reductions within two years,” explicitly tying the latter to scaling automation and agentic workflows.

• On what breaks pilots, they state the number one reason AI pilots fail is challenges with data quality.

ARISE: State of Clinical AI Report 2026

ARISE describes itself as an interdisciplinary research network, founded in 2024 as a collaboration between clinicians and researchers across multiple academic medical centers, focused on evaluating clinical AI through real-world studies, open benchmarks, and reproducible methods. In their positioning, the State of Clinical AI Report 2026 is framed as an inaugural annual synthesis that pulls together the current deployment landscape, the state of evaluation quality, and what kinds of evidence they think should come next.

Context

According to ARISE, AI is already embedded across healthcare, with 1,200+ FDA-cleared tools and 350,000+ consumer apps contributing to a $70B market, while only a minority of these systems have undergone peer-reviewed evaluation.

Among 691 FDA-cleared AI/ML medical devices cleared between 1995 and 2023, more than 95% went through the 510(k) pathway, which relies on equivalence to existing devices, including devices the report characterizes as sometimes being cleared on suboptimal evidence.

ARISE adds that FDA device summaries frequently lack key study details, reporting that about 50% omitted study design, 53% did not include sample size, and fewer than 1% reported patient outcomes. They also report that 95% of summaries did not include demographic data and 91% did not include bias assessments, and they frame these gaps as relevant to safety and equity in real-world use.

The report’s six key themes are:

• Models made major leaps in actionable prediction and autonomous clinical reasoning, but the “jagged frontier” persists, including brittleness around uncertainty.

• Real-world task evaluation is positioned as a prerequisite for trustworthy clinical AI, with a push beyond traditional QA-style benchmarks.

• A shift from better models to better systems, including methods like multi-agent orchestration, multimodal models, and reasoning fine-tuning, with trade-offs.

• Workflow design matters as much as model capability, with explicit attention to failure modes, automation bias, and deskilling risk.

• Patient-facing AI is treated as its own category, where outcome measurement and safeguards are central and patients are not assumed to provide oversight.

• The report argues the time for context-specific prospective trials is now, noting that randomized prospective trials have already started and framing 2026 as the next wave of evidence.

JPM Takeaways: Less Deals, More Assets

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First things first, we’re pleased to share that our Board Advisor, Andrii Lozoniuk, is in San Francisco for JPM2026 starting today. Andrii will be on the ground throughout the week tracking deal flow, strategic signals, and early-year sentiment across biotech and pharma, with a short roundup to follow in the newsletter.

If you’re in SF and would like to connect, reach out to Andrii directly or email us at info@biopharmatrend.com to set up a time.

An Endpoints tally put the first full week of January at roughly $2.3B in new private biotech capital, with public follow-ons and an IPO pushing the combined total to about $4.9B heading into JPM. In parallel, 2025 closed with healthcare private equity at a record ~$190B in deal value.

Early 2026 deal flow is already heavy, spanning Servier’s €1B+ AI partnership with Iktos, Lilly’s up to $950M InduPro collaboration and its $1.3B Nimbus obesity pact, plus M&A led by Lilly’s $1.2B Ventyx buy and Amgen’s up to $840M Dark Blue acquisition. The biggest potential headline sits above the confirmed deals. Financial Times reported Merck is in talks to buy Revolution Medicines for up to $32B.

On the big-tech and healthcare side, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, and Anthropic used the JPM week to roll out Claude for Healthcare.

Historical note

JPM’s rush week has deep roots. The event started in 1983 as a small Hambrecht & Quist healthcare investor meeting at the Westin St. Francis with about 20 presenting companies and roughly 200 attendees, initially centered on biotech.

Its scope widened after H&Q was acquired by Chase in 2000 and Chase was acquired by J.P. Morgan in 2001, bringing the conference under the J.P. Morgan umbrella and expanding the mix to pharma, startups, payers, and non-profits.

Over time, JPM has served as a sentiment barometer as well as a deal-stage, including visible inflection points like the early-2000s genomics boom and a more muted 2009 meeting amid the financial crisis. Last year’s conference reflected heightened security concerns, uncertainty around incoming U.S. policy shifts, and increasing attention to Chinese assets.

Early signals

A few sentiments are coming through consistently in conversations at JPM today: companies are openly scanning for assets across stages, “cheap China” is part of the comparison set but not the only axis, and there’s a clear emphasis on deal quality and fit over price alone. That said, day one has been heavier on intent and positioning than on fresh signatures, with more deal talk than deal announcements so far.

Two anchors could help interpret the broader flow of headlines this week and onwards. One is the patent cliff, with nearly $300B in revenue expected to lose exclusivity by the end of the decade, keeping lifecycle management, partnering, and selective M&A high on agendas. The other is the obesity race, where pressure around oral candidates, next-gen GLP-1s, and differentiation continues to shape R&D prioritization and capital deployment.

With that context set, here are the past week’s and today’s developments through our usual, more granular lens.

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Manas AI, launched last January by LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Siddhartha Mukherjee with $24.6M, just announced a partnership with Schrödinger to integrate physics-based modeling into its AI platform for discovering small molecules, biologics, and RNA therapies.

🔹 Post-IPO, Insilico Medicine advances AI-designed gut-targeted drug into Phase II for ulcerative colitis, aiming to repair the intestinal barrier with a PHD inhibitor developed using its generative AI platform. Also, Insilico says it nominated a preclinical small-molecule candidate with Hisun just 8 months after launching their AI-driven discovery collaboration.

🔹 Tahoe, Arc Institute, and CZI’s Biohub partner to create largest virtual cell dataset, generating 120M cells and 225k perturbations to fuel open-source AI models simulating drug response and disease biology.

🔹 Owkin partners with NVIDIA to scale AI agents for biology, advancing its reasoning model on patient data and launching Pathology Explorer with Anthropic’s Claude to support drug discovery and diagnostics.

🔹 DrugCLIP debuts as a post-AlphaFold AI model, screening protein-small molecule interactions up to x10 million faster than docking by embedding structures and chemistry in a shared space, with a database of 500M compounds.

🔹 Boston-based Somite AI rebrands as Cellular Intelligence to pursue a universal virtual cell signaling model, scaling its microfluidics platform to over 1M conditions to map how signal sequences guide cell fate.

🔹 1910 releases AI model PEGASUS that generates cell-permeable macrocyclic peptides with high polarity, addressing a key barrier in peptide drug development.

🔹 Dyno Therapeutics unveils Dyno-yp2, an AI-designed AAV capsid showing >94% brain transduction and 80-fold liver detargeting in TfR-humanized mice, advancing CNS gene therapy delivery.

🔹 Following its $130M Series B and unicorn $1.3B valuation, Chai Discovery partners with Eli Lilly to train custom AI for biologics design, integrating its antibody generation platform with Lilly’s proprietary data.

🔹 BigHat Biosciences expands its collaboration with Eli Lilly to develop generalizable AI models for antibody drug discovery, using high-throughput wet lab data to improve early-stage candidate selection.

🔹 Freenome teams up with NVIDIA to scale AI for early cancer detection, using accelerated deep learning to enhance blood-based tests and develop an open-source foundation model for cell-free DNA analysis.

🔹 Lantern Pharma launches AI Center of Excellence in India to scale its RADR drug discovery platform, expand beyond oncology, and industrialize multi-agent AI for global biopharma partners.

🔹 Medable launches AI agent to automate trial master file processing, aiming to cut manual work and speed up clinical trial operations.

🔹 Danish biotech Genmab partners with US-based Anthropic to deploy Claude-powered agentic AI tools to accelerate data analysis and document generation in clinical development.

🔹 AI to guide dual-action cancer therapy — US-based BostonGene partners with Ottimo Pharma to apply multiomic AI models for patient selection and clinical acceleration of a first-in-class PD-1/VEGFR2 immuno-oncology antibody.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Bayer partners with Amsterdam-based Cradle in 3-year deal to deploy generative AI for antibody discovery and jointly advance machine learning tools to speed biologics development.

🔹 OpenAI launches ChatGPT Health and ChatGPT Healthcare, consumer and clinical tools built on GPT-5.2 for personalized guidance and hospital use, now live in major U.S. health systems (early access).

🔹 Anthropic follows with Claude for Healthcare, a HIPAA-ready clinical and consumer AI tool unveiled at JPM26, enabling health data integration, admin support, and medical reasoning across U.S. systems. The company also added a ClinicalTrials.gov connector to Claude, enabling structured AI access to over 500k trials for protocol drafting, and more.

🔹 UK’s Basecamp Research, with NVIDIA and Microsoft, launches AI models for precise gene insertion, enabling new gene and cell therapies and designing antimicrobials against drug-resistant bacteria.

🔹 Schrödinger integrates Eli Lilly’s $1B AI platform into LiveDesign, giving drug developers access to molecular design models for small molecules and antibodies starting in Q1 2026.

🔹 Eli Lilly integrates its AI platform with Benchling, giving over 1,300 biotechs access to drug discovery models for small molecules and antibodies via secure federated learning.

🔹 MIT and Microsoft researchers create an AI model to design nanoparticle-bound peptides that signal cancer-linked enzyme activity, enabling low-cost, at-home urine tests for early diagnosis.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 NVIDIA and Lilly to launch $1B AI drug discovery hub in South San Francisco to co-develop next-gen biology and chemistry models by linking automated labs with AI systems.

🔹 Servier signs €1B+ multi-target AI drug discovery deal with Iktos, tapping its generative design and robotic synthesis platform for small-molecule programs in oncology and neurology.

🔹 Eli Lilly signs up to $950M deal with US-based InduPro to develop AI-guided multispecific cancer therapies using a membrane protein mapping platform to improve tumor targeting and reduce toxicity.

🔹 GSK signs $50M+ deal with Noetik for AI-driven virtual cell models to simulate tumor biology in lung and colorectal cancer.

🔹 After raising over $290M in Hong Kong’s largest biotech IPO of 2025, Insilico Medicine signs up to $888M oncology deal with Servier, combining AI-driven drug discovery with Servier’s clinical development to advance small-molecule cancer therapies.

🔹 Hippocratic AI raises $141M Series B at $1.6B valuation, launching a healthcare agent app store and acquiring Grove AI to expand into life sciences, now partnering with 23 health systems and backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, a16z, and NVIDIA.

🔹 insitro to acquire Israel-based CombinAbleAI to launch TherML, a unified AI platform for designing small molecules, oligos, and biologics.

🔹 US-based Soley Therapeutics raises $200M Series C to advance its AI-powered cell stress sensing platform and move two first-in-class oncology drugs toward clinical trials.

🔹 RNA biotech goes public — China-based Ribo Life Science raises over $230M in a heavily oversubscribed Hong Kong IPO to advance its siRNA pipeline targeting cardiometabolic and renal diseases.

🔹 BioNTech and UPenn launch a $50M seed fund to back early-stage therapeutics, diagnostics, and AI drug discovery startups emerging from Penn research, aiming to boost innovation beyond mRNA.

🔹 Servier launches €200M VC arm — French pharma Servier establishes Servier Ventures to invest in early-stage European biotech startups in oncology and neurology, expanding its dealmaking strategy through minority stakes.

🔹 Targeting all EGFR forms — US-based EpiBiologics, a Genentech spinout, raises $107M Series B to advance its first-in-class protein-degrading antibody for lung and head-and-neck cancers, aiming to overcome mutation-specific resistance with a broader EGFR approach.

🔹 Scaling spatial biology — US-based Vizgen raises $48M to expand global access to its spatial multi-omics platform, accelerate product innovation, and scale manufacturing for single-cell research tools.

🔹 American biotech Locus Biosciences awarded $3.3M from NIH, with up to $28M total, to run a clinical trial of its AI- and synthetic biology-powered bacteriophage therapy for drug-resistant pneumonia in ICU patients.

🔹 Finnish startup Avenue Biosciences raises $5.7M to scale its AI-driven platform for high-throughput protein engineering, aiming to ease manufacturing of complex biologics.

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⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 In Alzheimer’s drug search, Novoron wins $2.5M NIH grant to develop an AI-assisted human brain organoid platform that screens drugs targeting tau spread in more realistic brain models.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 AI takes over routine prescribing — Utah pilots AI-only prescription renewals via startup Doctronic, co-led by a UCSF surgeon, marking a US first in automating clinical decisions without physician input for chronic care management.

🔹 FDA issues draft guidance endorsing Bayesian methods in clinical trials, aiming to speed drug development by enabling more flexible designs and efficient use of prior data, especially in rare and pediatric diseases.

🔹 FDA approved 46 new drugs in 2025, with oncology leading (35%) and strong showings in bispecifics, ADCs, and RNA; first-in-class standouts and modest sales forecasts highlight a shift toward focused, mid-scale innovation.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 MIT spinout Boltz launches with $28M and Pfizer deal, aiming to democratize biomolecular AI with open-source models and a hosted discovery platform for drug design and protein engineering.

🔹 CRISPR’s first one-patient success becomes a company as Aurora Therapeutics launches with $16M to scale custom gene editing for rare diseases, founded by Jennifer Doudna and Fyodor Urnov after their therapy for “Baby KJ.”

🔹 Relation partners with Deerfield to launch joint NewCos, advancing AI-discovered therapeutic targets from its lab-in-the-loop platform into drug development through a shared translation model.

🔹 Topos Bio emerges from stealth with Topos-1, an all-atom foundation model for intrinsically disordered proteins, aiming to unlock drug discovery for ~40% of the human proteome missed by tools like AlphaFold.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

As we close out the year, thank you for reading us in 2025. Wishing you a good holiday season and a strong year ahead!

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI-first reset — Verge Genomics dropped its only clinical ALS candidate after a Phase 1 failure and is pivoting back to its core AI drug discovery platform, focusing on scaling its machine-learning models and human datasets rather than advancing in-house clinical programs.

🔹 Multimodal biology world model — Bioptimus released M-Optimus, a foundation model trained across histology, transcriptomics, and clinical data from millions of patients, designed to link cellular, tissue, and patient-level biology for drug discovery, trial design, and in-silico simulations, with early access opened to pharma users.

🔹 World models enter clinical AI — Nabla partnered exclusively with Advanced Machine Intelligence, founded by Yann LeCun, to access next-generation AI “world models” aimed at enabling safer, FDA-certifiable agentic systems in healthcare, strengthening Nabla’s long-term clinical AI strategy.

🔹 Antibodies with low immunogenicity — Latent Labs unveiled a new generative AI model that produces antibody and peptide drug candidates showing strong binding and low immune activation in ex vivo human assays, following its $50M launch from stealth in February.

🔹 AI-designed antibodies near clinic — New open-source and commercial AI models are enabling fast, precise antibody design, with teams reporting strong target binding after testing as few as ~15 AI-generated candidates, signaling that AI-designed antibodies may soon enter clinical trials.

🔹 AI-designed proteins — Galux entered a research agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to explore AI-driven precision protein design for therapeutics to create purpose-built proteins, following Galux’s recent success in de novo antibody design.

🔹 AI obesity drug enters clinic — Enveda received US FDA IND clearance and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of a once-daily oral small-molecule therapy for chronic weight management, discovered using its AI-driven chemical biodiversity platform.

🔹 Revvity launched an AI models-as-a-service platform that embeds predictive molecular and materials design models directly into lab workflows, linking in-silico design with experimental data; early access planned for 1H 2026.

🔹 AI biologics company updates pipeline — Reporting Q2 FY2026 results, MindWalk said its AI-designed GLP-1 receptor agonist exceeded semaglutide in vitro and that it identified a conserved epitope for a potential universal dengue vaccine.

🔹 Causal genomics at scale — Parse Biosciences and Codebreaker Labs partnered to pair large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing with engineered variants, enabling parallel functional testing of thousands of variants and generation of causal genomic data for AI model training.

🔹 Drugging hard targets — Talus Bio and PRISM BioLab formed a research collaboration combining AI-driven regulome profiling with small-molecule chemistry to discover new modulators of transcription factors and protein–protein interactions, aiming to generate first-in-class compounds against historically undruggable targets.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Oral GLP-1 milestone — Novo Nordisk received FDA approval for the first once-daily oral GLP-1 therapy for obesity, showing ~16.6% average weight loss over 64 weeks in trials, a move expected to broaden uptake beyond injections and intensify competition with Eli Lilly as obesity drugs become a core big-pharma market.

🔹 HIV phase 3 switch success — Gilead reported a second late-stage win for a two-drug, single-tablet HIV regimen, showing noninferiority to its standard therapy in virologically suppressed patients, clearing the path for regulatory filings and a potential 2027 launch.

🔹 Pan-KRAS China deal — AstraZeneca struck a licensing deal with Jacobio Pharma worth up to $2B for an early-stage pan-KRAS inhibitor in Phase I trials, paying $100M upfront with milestones and royalties, and taking ex-China development and commercialization rights.

🔹 Multispecific antibody deal — Harbour BioMed partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb on multispecific antibody discovery and early development, securing $90M upfront with up to ~$1.1B in development and commercial milestones, leveraging Harbour’s fully human antibody platform and China-based clinical capabilities.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI drug developer targets IPO — Insilico Medicine is seeking about $292M in Hong Kong IPO following major private funding, expanded AI drug discovery partnerships with Eli Lilly, and Phase 2a clinical data for its lead fibrosis program.

🔹 NVIDIA-backed AI drug discovery — In parallel to the recent Novartis partnership, Relation Therapeutics disclosed an additional $26M investment from insiders including NVIDIA’s nVentures, DCVC, and Magnetic Ventures.

🔹 Autonomous AI scientists — Edison Scientific, a Future House spin-out building AI systems that automate large parts of scientific research, raised $70M to scale an “AI scientist” platform that handles literature analysis, hypothesis generation, molecular design, and experiment planning across drug discovery and related fields.

🔹 AI oncology target discovery deal — Genentech partnered with Caris Life Sciences on an AI-driven cancer target discovery collaboration, paying $25M upfront with up to $1.1B in milestones and royalties tied to solid tumor precision medicine programs.

🔹 AI-driven CNS drug discovery — MapLight Therapeutics partnered with Alphabet spinout SandboxAQ to discover CNS drugs using AI-based GPCR modeling, paying an undisclosed upfront with up to $200M in milestones, while MapLight retains clinical and commercial control.

🔹 Vertical AI funding — Manifold, which builds AI workflows for life sciences research and clinical data, raised an $18M Series B led by Reach Capital to expand its platform used for tasks spanning discovery, clinical development, and precision medicine.

🔹 Virtual heart safety models — InSilicoTrials and The Jackson Laboratory are leading a $30M ARPA-H–funded program to use AI and computational heart models to predict drug-induced cardiac risk, aiming to replace animal testing with human-relevant digital simulations in early drug safety.

🔹 AI maps gene function at scale — insitro validated its pooled CRISPR and self-supervised imaging platform in Nature Communications, showing it can map gene function at genome scale and recover ~2.5x more functional relationships than conventional target-discovery methods.

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 China biotech momentum — US Senate-mandated report warned China is rapidly outpacing the US in parts of biopharma innovation, citing faster clinical trial approvals, a surge in global licensing deals (from 5% in 2022 to 42% in early 2025), and higher trial volume than the US, prompting calls for a $15B US government response to retain competitiveness.

🔹 FDA expands real-world data use — The FDA said it will accept broader, deidentified real-world datasets in certain medical device submissions, allowing large registry and EHR-based evidence to be reviewed case by case, with potential future expansion to drugs and biologics.

🔹 US Biosecurity law advances — The U.S. House passed a defense bill including the Biosecure Act, which limits U.S. biopharma ties with certain Chinese biotech firms over national security and genetic data concerns; awaiting final Senate approval and presidential signature.

🔹 Federal AI infrastructure push — Accenture Federal Services partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy to support the Genesis Mission, a national program to connect supercomputers, scientific data, and AI models, with Accenture contributing platform architecture, data curation, and AI-driven automation for large-scale scientific research.

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🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 All-RNA gene insertion — Addition Therapeutics emerged from stealth with $106.5M in funding to develop gene therapies based on RNA-only retrotransposons (“jumping genes”), aiming to precisely insert full genes into the genome without CRISPR or DNA-based editing.

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI recreates immune landscapes from routine slides — Microsoft Research, Providence, and UW introduce GigaTIME, an AI model that generates virtual spatial proteomics from standard H&E pathology images, enabling large-scale analysis of tumor-immune interactions across 14,000 cancer patients and uncovering key predictors of immunotherapy response.

🔹 AI designs minimal gene editors — Researchers from the Doudna lab and collaborators use an AI model informed by structure and evolution to design compact gene editors, demonstrating activity in human and plant cells.

🔹 PsiThera launches with AI–physics fusion for oral biologics — PsiThera debuts with a platform combining physics-based simulations and AI to develop oral drugs for inflammation and immunology, advancing a lead program to optimization in ~4 months using its QUAISAR design engine.

🔹 Recursion reports positive Phase 1b/2 results for an AI-discovered MEK1/2 inhibitor, showing 43% median polyp reduction at 12 weeks and durable 53% reduction 12 weeks post-treatment in patients with familial adenomatous polyposis, a condition with no approved therapies.

🔹 AI model vs. AlphaFold limits — A new preprint from the EVOLVED 2024 team introduces Plica-1, a scalable protein prediction model reportedly handling structures 8x larger than AlphaFold3, enabling ultra-fast predictions on standard hardware.

🔹 New benchmark compares AlphaFold3, Chai-1 & peers — Shared by Siqi Sun (Fudan University), FoldBench is a new large-scale benchmark evaluating all-atom structure prediction models like AlphaFold3, Boltz-1, and Chai-1 across 1,522 biomolecular assemblies; while AF3 leads overall, antibody-antigen and ligand docking tasks remain key challenges.

🔹 LatchBio launches agent.bio, a public sandbox showcasing AI agents for spatial biology data analysis across leading platforms like MERFISH and Visium.

🔹 AI-native PACS debuts at RSNA — French startup Raidium unveils a PACS viewer powered by its Curia foundation model, trained on over 1B images to automate full diagnostic workflows across modalities, aiming to support radiologists with a single-prompt, end-to-end copilot.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Merck and Nvidia debut open-source drug model — Merck teams up with Nvidia to launch KERMT, a multitask AI model trained on 11M+ molecules to predict small-molecule drug properties.

🔹 AI meets immunology — Novartis partners with Relation to discover novel targets for atopic diseases, combining Relation’s AI platform with Novartis’s immuno-dermatology expertise to accelerate development of first-in-class therapies for immune-driven allergic conditions.

🔹 GSK spins out bioelectronic VC arm — GSK separates from Action Potential Venture Capital, its unit focused on electrical pulse-based therapies, with former leadership launching the new Synapse Fund—marking GSK’s second corporate VC spinout after SR One.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI antibody startup hits unicorn status — OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery raises $130M in Series B, reaching a $1.3B valuation just months after its last round, with funding driven by momentum around its zero-shot antibody design platform, capable of generating novel high-affinity binders for hard-to-drug targets.

🔹 Valinor Discovery, launched in May 2025, secures $13M to expand its ML platform, which uses multi-omic and clinical data to predict patient response and design more targeted clinical trials, aiming to reduce failure rates and accelerate drug development.

🔹 AI pharma adds CNS-targeting asset — Formation Bio acquires global rights (ex-China) to a CNS-penetrant TYK2 inhibitor from Lynk Pharmaceuticals, aiming to begin Phase 1 in 2026 via its new subsidiary, with deal value up to $605M.

🔹 AI-powered lab automation startup lands $52M — Medra raises a $52M Series A to scale its “Physical AI Scientist” platform, which combines robotic instrument control and autonomous experimental reasoning.

🔹 Apple Tree Partners files for bankruptcy to keep biotechs afloat & to maintain funding for 13 portfolio companies amid a dispute with key investor Rigmora.

🔹 First nonprofit-led gene therapy wins FDA approval — Italy’s Fondazione Telethon becomes the first nonprofit to gain FDA approval for a gene therapy, with Waskyra treating Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome using a patient’s own genetically corrected stem cells, following strong reductions in infections and bleeding in clinical studies.

🔹 EpilepsyGTx raises $33M for targeted seizure gene therapy — UK spinout secures $33M to advance an AAV-based gene therapy delivered directly to seizure hotspots in focal refractory epilepsy, aiming to achieve lasting seizure control with a single, localized treatment.

🔹 Lumexa Imaging raises $462.5M in IPO — North Carolina-based Lumexa Imaging more than doubles its target, pulling in $462.5M in its Nasdaq debut, as the radiology provider touts AI-driven gains across its 184-site imaging network and eyes a $140B U.S. diagnostic market.

🔹 Philips acquires AI heart imaging startup SpectraWAVE to integrate its AI-driven coronary imaging tools into its image-guided therapy platform.

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⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Neuralink hires key FDA brain-device regulator — Neuralink brings on David McMullen, former FDA official who oversaw neurological device approvals, as head of medical affairs, aiming to streamline regulatory pathways for its BCI as it targets commercial use by 2030.

🔹 Rethinking drug safety — Inductive Bio, Amgen, and academic partners launch a $21M ARPA-H-funded initiative to build AI models that predict drug toxicity using human organoids, with Amgen aiming to submit the first FDA application based on human data instead of animal testing.

🔹 Medable and Tufts CSDD launch Innovation Evidence Workshop series, sharing data linking decentralized trial components to 40% faster enrollment and 3x higher recruitment.

🔹 Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Q-CTRL demonstrate quantum-powered hydration-site prediction on IBM hardware, achieving classical-level precision with 123-qubit runs in 25 minutes.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Radiology dominates FDA AI approvals in 2025 — Thomas Hagemeijer of HGM Advisory reports how FDA-cleared AI algorithms grew steadily in 2025, with radiology making up 77% of approvals, while neurology gained ground; despite strong growth (46% CAGR since 2015), clinical adoption still lags due to performance and workflow limitations.

🔹 New York Gastroenterology Associates adopts Proscia’s AI-powered digital pathology platform to boost diagnostic speed and accuracy.

🔹 FDA qualifies first AI tool for MASH trials — PathAI’s AIM-NASH becomes the first FDA-qualified AI tool to assess liver biopsies in MASH clinical trials, aiming to standardize scoring of fat, inflammation, and scarring.

🔹 NSF backs next-gen research orgs — The NSF launches its Tech Labs Initiative to fund independent, interdisciplinary research teams outside academia, aiming to fast-track breakthrough technologies with milestone-based funding and operational autonomy, and invites public feedback via a new RFI.

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Designing Full-Length Antibodies

Chai Discovery, founded in 2024 and backed by OpenAI among others, has raised a $130M Series B at a reported $1.3B valuation, bringing total funding to $225M just four months after its previous $70M round. The financing follows the release of Chai-2, the company’s latest antibody design model, and the company says the capital will be used to build out a broader computer-aided molecular design suite.

Chai-2 designs full-length monoclonal antibodies rather than fragments or binders alone. In internal studies cited by the company, 86% of generated antibodies showed zero or one flagged issue against common preclinical criteria, and 24 of 28 targets produced at least one candidate characterized as clean and drug-like. Structural validation using cryo-EM on five antibody–antigen complexes reportedly showed binding at intended epitopes with sub-angstrom agreement, including in CDR loops.

The company also reports results on harder targets. Chai-2 generated binders across six GPCRs while testing as few as 10 to 73 designs per target, including agonistic antibodies in full mAb format. In peptide–MHC experiments, testing 27 to 50 designs yielded binders specific to KRAS G12V, without binding to closely related variants. Chai frames its longer-term objective as producing IND-ready biologics in a single in silico pass, alongside a stated “Responsible Deployment policy” that restricts access based on use and safety considerations.

Microsoft’s Spatial Proteomics

A recurring limitation in immuno-oncology is that immune cell states in the tumor microenvironment matter, but are largely invisible in standard H&E slides. Methods that expose those states, such as multiplex immunofluorescence, are informative but expensive and difficult to apply broadly, which limits population-level analysis.

A recent paper in Cell from Microsoft Research, working with Providence and the University of Washington approaches this by treating routine pathology as a latent source of cell-state information. The authors build on the observation that H&E morphology and spatial organization already reflect underlying biological states, even if those states are not directly measurable in standard slides. GigaTIME is designed to translate these routinely available images into virtual multiplex immunofluorescence signals, estimating spatial proteomic patterns that are otherwise costly and scarce.

The team trained a model to translate H&E slides into virtual multiplex immunofluorescence signals and then used those simulated readouts to explore immune-related patterns across large patient cohorts. The work is positioned as a way to enable population-scale tumor microenvironment analysis that would otherwise be constrained by data availability, rather than as a replacement for physical assays or a complete account of immunotherapy response.

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 RosettaFold 3 and RFdiffusion3 push frontier of molecular design — UW’s Institute for Protein Design, with Microsoft, launches RosettaFold 3, a unified model for atom-level structure prediction across proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules, while RFdiffusion3, now open source, enables design of DNA binders and catalytic enzymes.

🔹 New benchmark brings AI closer to real-world oncology care — Researchers release MTBBench, a NeurIPS-accepted dataset that models longitudinal, multimodal cancer patient journeys to evaluate foundation models and AI agents in Molecular Tumor Board–style clinical decision-making.

🔹 AI platform hits discovery milestone in big-pharma collaboration — Terray Therapeutics reached a discovery milestone with BMS using its EMMI platform, which couples high-throughput chemistry with generative AI to find novel small molecules for hard-to-drug targets.

🔹 AI-designed antibody enters late-stage testing for severe asthma — Generate:Biomedicines will launch two global Phase 3 trials enrolling ~1,600 patients to evaluate a long-acting anti-TSLP antibody, engineered with AI for six-month dosing, aiming to reduce asthma exacerbations and treatment burden.

🔹 Degrader design — Insilico unveiled an AI-generated PKMYT1 PROTAC that both degrades and inhibits its target, showing selective pathway shutdown and anti-tumor activity in biomarker-defined models with oral exposure in animals; the molecule has advanced to pre-candidate validation.

🔹 AI-guided repurposing flags new GBM candidate — Insilico and Atossa used a multi-omics/AI pipeline to rank (Z)-endoxifen as a top glioblastoma opportunity, identifying 1,400+ shared dysregulated genes and validating stronger in-vitro activity than standard therapy, with in-vivo tolerability supporting further exploration.

🔹 Quantum–biotech tie-up for advanced therapies — IonQ and CCRM formed a strategic partnership to apply hybrid quantum/AI methods to bioprocess optimization and disease-modeling within CCRM’s global regenerative-medicine network, with initial projects launching in 2026.

🔹 AI-designed antibodies with high hit rates from tiny design sets — Galux reports that just 50 de novo designs per epitope yielded ~32% binders and multiple picomolar hits, showing a shift from library-based antibody discovery to precise, small-scale computational design validated directly in IgG format.

🔹 BenchSci unveils LEAP to predict novel biology and design experiments — an AI inference engine that generates evidence-backed hypotheses and experimental plans by reasoning across a predictive knowledge graph built from multimodal, structured biomedical data. BenchSci is also hosting its first hackathon with Google to prototype AI co-scientists for preclinical research.

🔹 Ranking pathogenicity of every variant in a genome — HMS researchers unveiled popEVE, a model that scores each genetic variant by disease likelihood, distinguishing benign vs. pathogenic changes and predicting age-of-onset severity.

🔹 RapidAI deepens AWS partnership for global imaging AI — The companies will co-develop scalable clinical-AI tools, combining cloud pipelines with domain-specific imaging models to speed diagnosis and workflow automation across hospitals in 100+ countries.

🔹 IQVIA taps AWS to power agentic AI for clinical trials — The collaboration will deploy a cloud-based agentic AI platform to automate trial execution, medical affairs, and analytics at scale.

🔹 New biotech startup proposes shift from language to biology in oncology AI — Standard Model, emerged from stealth in September 2025, outlines its multimodal foundation model that predicts patient state changes over time, aiming to replace text-based medical AI with causal, intervention-aware simulations of disease progression.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 GE HealthCare and Mayo Clinic build digital twins for personalized radiotherapy — The partners launched GEMINI-RT to use imaging, AI, and patient-specific digital models to automate radiation planning, predict treatment outcomes, and monitor side effects.

🔹 Imaging giants roll out end-to-end AI systems at RSNA 2025 — GE HealthCare, Philips, and Siemens unveiled AI-integrated MRI, CT, PET/SPECT, and interventional imaging platforms.

🔹 AI-guided antibody optimization expands — LabGenius and Sanofi launched a second collaboration in which LabGenius’ ML platform will optimize compact antibody formats for multiple inflammation targets, following successful results from their prior partnership.

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💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI rekindles VC appetite for biotech — PitchBook reports that AI-native biotechs command nearly double the valuations of peers, with $3.2B invested across 135 deals in the past year, as foundation models and in-silico discovery convince investors that AI can cut R&D risk, cost, and timelines.

🔹 Gene-writing moves toward clinic — Tessera inked a $150M deal with Regeneron to advance its gene-writing therapy for AAT deficiency, with clinical trials set to begin soon; competing approaches from CRISPR Therapeutics and Prime Medicine are also nearing the clinic.

🔹 Automated chemistry for AI-driven drug discovery — Excelsior Sciences raises $95M, including a $70M Series A led by Deerfield, Khosla, and Sofinnova, to scale its machine-executable chemistry platform that enables closed-loop small molecule discovery and reshoring of pharmaceutical manufacturing.

🔹 Largest US oncology trial network takes shape — Paradigm Health acquired Flatiron’s clinical research business, creating a network spanning 25+ academic centers and ~100 community oncology sites and forming a long-term partnership to embed AI-enabled trial infrastructure into routine cancer care and expand access to more representative studies.

🔹 Human-data over animal models — Revalia Bio won up to $26.7M from ARPA-H to build AI models trained on donated human organs and organ-on-chip systems, aiming to predict drug safety/efficacy more accurately and cut late-stage failures.

🔹 $31.7M ARPA-H award to replace animal testing — Deep Origin will develop AI-driven virtual human safety models using ex vivo assays and foundational ML tools to accelerate and humanize drug testing.

🔹 Quantum drug sims get faster — QSimulate raised seed funding to $11M+ and released QUELO v2.3, enabling 1000x-faster quantum-level modeling now extended to larger and peptide molecules, supporting work with multiple global pharma partners.

🔹 AI-designed industrial proteins draw fresh capital — Aether Biomachines raises $15M to scale its AI/robotics platform for engineering proteins that enable faster, stronger materials and industrial biocatalysts for metal extraction, carbon capture, and pollutant cleanup.

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⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Stem-cell cure without HIV-resistant cells — a man with HIV and leukemia is now virus-free for 7+ years after a stem-cell transplant from a donor without the CCR5-null HIV-resistant mutation, reinforcing that cures may not require CCR5-deleted cells and expanding potential donor pools.

🔹 Human myelin repair-in-a-dish — Roche scientists built a myelinating human brain organoid that models demyelination and remyelination within ~2 months, revealing a key role for microglia in clearing damaged myelin and supporting repair.

🔹 BioAge advances NLRP3 inhibitor targeting age-related inflammation — Early Phase 1 data show BGE-102 is well tolerated with strong anti-inflammatory effects and brain penetration.

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 We’ve just published a new BiopharmaTrend feature on why Europe’s path to biotech success looks so different from the U.S. model.

🔹 Six months into deploying its generative AI tool Elsa, the FDA is hindered by fragmented, inconsistent data standards that limit AI’s impact; experts call for mandatory digital protocols, shared vocabularies, and stronger incentives to modernize regulatory submissions.

🔹 FDA expands AI use with new agentic system — introducing agentic AI tools to support complex tasks from reviews to inspections, building on its earlier LLM rollout as it seeks to accelerate workflows amid staffing cuts and missed decision deadlines.

🔹 Hybrid models take the lead in virtual cell prediction — Arc Institute announces winners of its inaugural Virtual Cell Challenge, where over 5,000 participants built AI models to predict cellular responses to genetic perturbations, with top teams combining statistical and deep learning methods to outperform pure AI approaches.

🔹 Pentagon flags WuXi AppTec as a potential security risk — The DoD urged Congress to add WuXi to its 1260H list for alleged ties to China’s military, a move that could strain the company’s U.S. business despite its denials and prior avoidance of stricter Biosecure Act sanctions.

🔹 CDC to end all monkey research in major policy shift — The CDC is shutting down its nonhuman primate research program, impacting ~200 macaques used in HIV and infectious disease studies, amid broader federal moves to reduce animal testing in favor of alternative methods.

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2025 Pharma Review: Patent Cliffs, Crowded Pipelines, Modality Risk

Bruce Booth’s latest Atlas Venture presentation offers a dense overview of the current pharma landscape in 2025, with an unusually explicit focus on the political context around regulation, manufacturing, and funding.

• Patent cliffs as main gravity
  Over the next five years, $40–45B in branded revenue is expected to go generic each year (roughly triple the recent average) forcing big pharma to replace 8–10 blockbusters annually. That gap is driving aggressive BD, earlier licensing, and more willingness to back preclinical assets that can move quickly to proof of concept.

• Crowded mechanisms and compressed timelines
  Thirty-six drug targets now have 50+ active programs globally, and time from first- to third-in-class approval has shrunk from ~15 years to under 2. In hot areas like GLP-1s, KRAS, and ADCs, programs compete on speed and capital efficiency as much as on biology, which erodes value for anything that isn’t clearly first- or best-in-class.

• Modality hangover after the “platform decade”
  New modalities—gene therapy, gene editing, molecular glues, and others—are generating real signals in patients, but safety events (including roughly two dozen deaths in systemic gene therapy/editing trials), CMC complexity, and uncertain commercial models are forcing a recalibration of expectations after years of platform optimism.

Lilly Exec Explains Rationale Behind TuneLab AI Model Sharing

In a recent Decoding Bio feature, Zahra Khwaja interviews Aliza Apple, VP of AI/ML at Eli Lilly, for a deeper look at the thinking behind TuneLab—Lilly’s federated platform for sharing in-house AI models with biotech partners. Launched in 2025, TuneLab allows partners to train Lilly’s internal models on their own data without transferring it, using a federated learning setup. This setup keeps proprietary data local while updating shared models globally.

Apple emphasizes that the models offered through TuneLab (covering ADMET and antibody developability) are the same ones used internally, trained on over 500,000 data points from two decades of experiments (and ~$1B worth of proprietary drug discovery data).

Apple explains that Lilly’s own data flows through the same infrastructure, including pre-IP assay data, and that the models offered are the exact ones used internally. Rather than compete on early discovery tools like ADMET prediction, the idea is to open up infrastructure in areas where most biotechs face the same pain points. The strategy reflects a shift toward shared tooling and ecosystem-wide iteration—something Apple compares to co-developing SaaS platforms. The conversation also touches on future directions: integrating clinical data, incorporating third-party models, and exploring agentic AI workflows.

Can AI Infrastructure Become Biotech’s Next Big Business?

In a recent Century of Biology Substack post, Elliot Hershberg asks whether AI infrastructure companies in biology (those selling tools rather than drugs) can become large, investable businesses. He contrasts AI-native drug developers like Xaira, Formation Bio, and Isomorphic Labs with infrastructure/tool plays like EvolutionaryScale, Chai Discovery, Cradle Bio, Achira, Latent Labs, and Axiom, noting that skepticism is shaped by the Schrödinger precedent and the belief that drugs capture more value than platforms.

Hershberg structures the argument as three stories:

• First, “compute as a reagent,” using next-generation sequencing as an analogy: Illumina, 10x Genomics, and Natera show how a foundational technology can scale from zero to a ~$10B+ market via elastic demand and strong margins, and he suggests AI+compute could fill a similar role as a ubiquitous research and clinical reagent, with NVIDIA and pharma GPU buildouts as early signals.

• Second, “from the wet lab to the GPU cluster,” he describes AI models increasingly standing in for experiments (AlphaFold, virtual cell models, Amgen’s viscosity prediction), raising the prospect that a growing share of R&D experiments shift from physical CRO-style work to computational runs sold as services.

• The third story, “AI for program decisions,” focuses on Axiom as an example of a company building toxicity prediction models that sit directly on high-value decision points in drug development, more analogous to Cadence in semiconductors than to a generic software vendor.

Across these three lenses, Hershberg frames the opportunity as a set of quantitative questions—what fraction of R&D spend, experiments, and per-program budgets will flow into AI tools over the next decade, and what share of that can new startups capture—rather than as a foregone conclusion that infra businesses will succeed.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI-designed antibodies reach drug-like quality — Nabla Bio unveils JAM-2, an AI model that designs high-affinity, developable antibodies with hit rates up to 70% against user-defined epitopes.

🔹 Ginkgo Bioworks launches the Virtual Cell Pharmacology Initiative (VCPI), an open-source framework aimed at generating 12B+ pharmacological data points to support AI drug discovery, featuring a standardized reference cell line and high-throughput DRUG-seq screening platform.

🔹 Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys and NIH unveil DeepTarget, an AI tool that predicts anti-cancer mechanisms of small molecules by integrating drug and genetic screens, enabling cancer drug repurposing by identifying primary and secondary targets.

🔹 Biohub debuts AI Workspace for single-cell analysis — The new tool lets researchers analyze single-cell data using AI models like scVI and TranscriptFormer, enabling rapid annotation, disease comparison, cross-species mapping, and phenotype matching via integration with CELLxGENE datasets.

🔹 AI reaches atomic precision in antibody design — New data from Chai-2 shows it can design full-length antibodies with high developability, match Cryo-EM structures across five targets and generate functional binders against hard-to-drug GPCRs.

🔹 Owkin launches Europe’s first agentic AI infrastructure for biology — In partnership with Gustave Roussy and Charité, Owkin unveils a pan-European platform to structure biomedical data for AI-powered research and drug development.

🔹 AI agents uncover hidden longevity drugs in public data — Researchers developed ClockBase Agent to autonomously analyze over 2 million molecular profiles, reportedly identifying 500+ overlooked anti-aging interventions and experimentally validating one—Ouabain—for reversing biological age in mice.

🔹 AI accelerates CRISPR genome editing innovation — A new review in Nature Reviews Genetics outlines how AI models are transforming genome editing by optimizing guide RNAs, engineering novel enzymes, and integrating virtual models to streamline therapeutic development.

🔹 Philips and Edwards Lifesciences unveil DeviceGuide, a real-time AI tool to assist heart valve implant procedures by tracking Edwards’ Pascal Ace device inside the beating heart, enhancing precision in mitral regurgitation treatments.

🔹 Simulating the gut to decode disease — UC San Diego researchers developed a genome-scale modeling tool to map how gut microbes respond to diet and disease, revealing key metabolic shifts in IBD and enabling personalized insights into microbiome-linked health conditions.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Eli Lilly becomes the first pharmaceutical company to reach a $1T market cap, driven by surging demand for its weight-loss and diabetes drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, which generated $10.1B in Q3 2025 revenue.

🔹 Merck KGaA strikes a potentially $3B+ AI drug discovery deal with Valo Health — Merck teams up with Valo to accelerate Parkinson’s drug discovery using AI trained on 17M patient records, marking a major return to the field after past setbacks and bolstering its pharma pipeline post-SpringWorks acquisition.

🔹 Johnson & Johnson acquires Halda Therapeutics for $3.05B, gaining access to its RIPTAC cancer drug platform and lead prostate cancer therapy HLD-0915, in a move that strengthens J&J’s oncology pipeline.

🔹 GSK selects Flagship’s Quotient Therapeutics and ProFound Therapeutics as its first biotech partners in a $7B collaboration, signing feasibility deals to discover novel targets for respiratory and liver diseases using somatic genomics and protein detection platforms.

🔹 GE HealthCare is going to acquire imaging software firm Intelerad for $2.3B to expand its cloud-first diagnostic ecosystem, aiming to boost recurring SaaS revenues and integrate AI across hospital, ambulatory, and teleradiology settings.

🔹 Freenome inks $200M+ deal with Roche to advance early cancer detection — Roche gains ex-US rights to multiomics tests, while Freenome gets $75M equity and access to plasma biobanks and data to accelerate lung cancer screening and validation.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI Proteins raises $42M Series A to advance its miniprotein drug platform using a hub-and-spoke model, with plans to develop selective, durable minibinders targeting receptors like TNFR1.

🔹 Profluent raises $106M Series B led by Altimeter Capital and Bezos Expeditions to scale frontier AI models for protein design, expanding its platform for genome editors, antibodies, and enzymes across therapeutics, agriculture, and biomanufacturing.

🔹 Function Health raises $298M Series B at a $2.5B valuation to power its AI health tracking platform, integrating lab tests, diagnostics, and clinical expertise, while launching a doctor-trained Medical Intelligence Lab to deliver personalized insights.

🔹 Lumexa Imaging files for IPO aiming to raise up to $200M, positioning itself as the second-largest U.S. outpatient imaging provider with 184 sites, leveraging AI tools to enhance diagnostic efficiency and reduce operating costs.

🔹 Cornerstone Robotics raises $200M to accelerate global commercialization of its Sentire surgical robot system, following China approval and U.K. clinical trials, backed by undisclosed global strategic and institutional investors.

🔹 Beacon Biosignals raises $86M Series B to develop a EEG and sleep data neurodiagnostic dataset to advance the application of brain health biomarkers for conditions like depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and sleep apnea.

🔹 Abbott acquires Exact Sciences for $23B, marking the largest diagnostics deal to date, adding Cologuard and multi-cancer blood tests to expand its diagnostics portfolio into precision oncology.

🔹 Cellbyte raises $2.75M to streamline drug launches with AI — Backed by Frontline Ventures and Y Combinator, Cellbyte’s platform helps pharma teams analyze regulatory, pricing, and clinical data in real time to accelerate go-to-market strategies.

🔹 QSimulate raises new seed funding, hits $11M total — Backed by Embark Ventures, the company also released QUELO v2.3, enhancing quantum-powered simulations for larger drug molecules like peptides, advancing AI-driven drug discovery.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Digital brain milestone — Scientists created one of the most detailed simulations of a whole mouse cortex using Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer, modeling 10 million neurons and 26 billion synapses to study brain function and disease with sub-cellular precision.

🔹 Tessera Therapeutics to begin first human trial of its in vivo gene writing platform in December, targeting alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency with TSRA-196 in a 72-patient study, marking a key milestone for Flagship’s $580M-backed biotech.

🔹 Speech-restoring brain implant enters human trials — Paradromics receives FDA approval to begin testing its BCI in people with severe motor impairment, aiming to enable synthesized speech by decoding neural signals at up to 200 bits per second.

🔹 Precise Bio completes the world’s first human cornea transplant using a 3D-printed, lab-grown implant made from cultured eye cells, marking a breakthrough in regenerative ophthalmology and tackling global donor tissue shortages.

🔹 Scribe Therapeutics reports strong preclinical data for three CRISPR-based programs lowering key cardiovascular risk factors in animals, including gene silencer STX-1150, and plans to move into the clinic targeting broader patient populations.

🔹 Human-cell bone marrow model breaks new ground — University of Basel scientists engineered a fully human 3D bone marrow system using stem cells and bone-like scaffolds, replicating key features of the endosteal niche for blood cancer research, drug testing, and future personalized therapies.

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Brain organoids spark debate over ethics and hype in biocomputing — As labs and startups explore brain organoids for biocomputing, researchers warn that inflated claims around “organoid intelligence” could mislead the public and risk overregulation, potentially undermining vital research into neurological diseases and drug safety.

🔹 UK Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee warns the government must urgently reform drug pricing and access processes to restore confidence in the life sciences sector, citing concerns over NICE’s complexity and US trade influence on UK domestic health policy.

🔹 NIH grant cuts have disrupted at least 383 clinical trials involving over 74,000 patients, disproportionately affecting infectious disease research and raising concerns over long-term impacts on patient care and scientific progress.

🔹 U.S. aims to reclaim biotech edge — A bipartisan bill proposes to establish a National Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Center of Excellence to boost domestic production, reduce reliance on foreign supply chains, and accelerate innovation critical to health, security, and workforce development.

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Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Experiment-driven ML for small-molecule design — Terray launched EMMI, an integrated microarray+AI platform built on 13B+ compound–target measurements and its COATI molecular foundation model, adding a new module that uses uncertainty-aware selection to boost potency-optimization efficiency ~3x across discovery programs.

🔹 Small-molecule generation: Quantum vs AI — in a working paper, Kendall Byler and Shahar Keinan show that the quantum-based QuADD platform produced more drug-like, higher-affinity, synthesizable molecules in ~30 minutes, outperforming an AI diffusion model that took ~40 hours and generated more diverse but less viable candidates.

🔹 BenchSci and Mila launched a multi-year collaboration to develop advanced predictive and generative models that automate hypothesis generation and assay prediction to accelerate AI-driven drug discovery.

🔹 Generative AI for anti-fibrotic peptides— Animate Biosciences launched a generative-AI platform that converts multi-omic insights from regenerative species into tailored peptide therapeutics, building a pipeline for inflammatory and fibrotic diseases across multiple organs.

🔹 AI-designed muscle-targeting AAV & Increasing ‘genetic agency’ — Dyno Therapeutics unveiled an AI-engineered AAV vector with improved muscle delivery and reduced liver exposure, high skeletal and cardiac transduction in primates at ~25x lower dose than typical muscle gene therapies.

🔹 Multi-omic dataset effort — Tempus and IFLI launched a multi-year study to build a large follicular lymphoma dataset using genomics, proteomics, and methylation profiling, to accelerate biomarker discovery and precision research.

🔹 AI-guided oncology pipeline progress — Lantern Pharma reported Q clinical and regulatory advances across its AI-driven cancer programs: early efficacy signals in multiple solid tumors, regulatory guidance for a planned pediatric CNS trial, and broader commercialization of its AI drug-discovery platform, with $12.4M in cash extending runway into ~Q3 2026.

🔹 Owkin released its biology-focused AI co-pilot on AWS Marketplace as a SaaS offering, enabling faster procurement and deployment of agentic research workflows powered by multimodal data and biological reasoning.

🔹 AI toxicology — Cellarity published an AI + multi-omics framework that predicts drug-induced liver injury using a large human hepatocyte transcriptomics dataset, achieving high accuracy and outperforming >20 standard safety models, with the tools released open-source (model and validation data).

🔹 Multimodal CRC biomarkers — Nucleai and the University of Glasgow partnered to use AI and spatial multi-omics data from a large polyp cohort to identify predictive biomarkers for colorectal cancer and improve early-risk stratification and surveillance.

🔹 Esophageal cancer biomarkers — BostonGene and Kyoto University partner to analyze multiomic tumor data from an ESCC trial, aiming to identify immune-linked biomarkers that guide targeted therapy development and patient stratification.

🔹 TCR atlas for autoimmunity — A stealth Third Rock Ventures company partnered with Parse Biosciences to generate a ~5M-receptor TCR atlas via the GigaLab platform, creating a resource to map immune drivers and accelerate autoimmune drug discovery.

🔹 AI agent for women’s health — Millie launched an AI assistant built on a new unified data platform that personalizes maternity support, automates routine questions and scheduling, and streamlines clinical workflows to boost efficiency across its growing clinic network.

🔹 Modular protein nanomaterials — UW researchers designed reusable protein building blocks that assemble into cages, lattices, and 3D crystals by engineering binding interfaces first, creating a more programmable toolkit for protein-based nanostructures.

🔹 Foundation-model pathology forecasting — MIT researchers used Bioptimus’ H-optimus-1 model, trained on >1M pathology slides, to predict six-month tumour progression from a single image with ~0.8 AUC.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI + physics drug discovery — TandemAI raised a $22M Series A extension to scale its AI-and-physics-based discovery platform and wet-lab infrastructure, bringing total funding to ~$80M and supporting a pipeline that has produced 10+ clinical-bound candidates.

🔹 Reprogramming diseased cells — Scripta Therapeutics raised $12M seed funding to develop AI- and biology-driven drugs that modulate transcription factor activity, aiming to reshape disease pathways, starting with neurodegeneration.

🔹 Programmable miniprotein drug design — AI Proteins raised ~$42M Series A to advance its first-principles, de novo miniprotein platform and launch programs through a hub-and-spoke model, building on its earlier ~$18M seed round and a Bristol Myers Squibb collaboration valued up to ~$400M.

🔹 AI–brain data scaling — Beacon Biosignals raised $86M Series B to expand its AI platform built on large-scale home EEG and sleep data, growing its neurobiomarker dataset and supporting CNS drug development across major pharma partners (incl. Takeda, UCB, Syndeio).

🔹 Sofinnova Partners closed a €650M ($750M) early-stage life sciences fund, lifting its total capital raised over the past year to €1.5B and expanding support for biotech and medtech startups across Europe and the US.

🔹 Medicxi raised €500M for its latest fund to back asset-focused biotechs across stages, bringing its total capital raised over the past decade to >€2B and building on recent exits and acquisitions that generated >$1B in returns.

🔹 Oncology CRO transfer — JSR Life Sciences will sell Crown Bioscience to Adicon, moving its tumor-model and translational oncology services to a new owner while keeping its biospecimens unit in-house.

🔹 Fabric acquired UCM Digital Health, adding ~1M covered lives and 400 payer/employer clients, reinforcing its scale across a platform now serving 100M+ people nationwide.

🔹 AI-enabled biosecurity push — OpenAI led a $15M seed round for Red Queen Bio, a Helix Nano spinout developing AI-driven defenses against misuse of biological design tools, extending OpenAI’s recent biosecurity investing efforts.

🔹 Japan’s new global biotech CVC — Hiroki Takai announced the launch of TOHO Ventures, a ¥10B (~$64M) fund created by TOHO HOLDINGS and Global Brain to back drug-discovery and modality-focused startups mainly in Europe and the U.S., leveraging TOHO’s nationwide clinical and distribution networks to support commercialization.

🔹 UK accelerates shift to non-animal testing — The UK unveiled a national roadmap, announced by Lord Vallance, committing £75M to scale organ-on-chip, 3D bioprinting, and AI/in-silico models, alongside a new UK Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods to speed regulatory acceptance and phase out multiple animal tests by 2026–2030.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 BCI-enabled camera control — Neuralink brain-computer implant allowed an ALS patient to control a motorized webcam and communicate more fluidly, marking one of 12 implanted users with a combined ~15,000 hours of device use.

🔹 100x more potent mRNA delivery — MIT researchers engineered a new degradable lipid nanoparticle that boosts mRNA vaccine potency ~100x in mice while lowering liver tox, enabling equal immune responses at ~1/100 the dose of current FDA-approved LNPs.

🔹 Induced-proximity oncology collaboration — General Proximity partnered with Daiichi Sankyo to use its OmniTAC platform to discover effector–target pairs for next-gen induced-proximity cancer therapeutics, expanding the platform’s reach to traditionally undruggable targets.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 New FDA path for custom gene editing — FDA leaders outlined a “plausible mechanism” pathway enabling individualized gene-editing therapies to gain approval based on demonstrated target engagement and biologic plausibility, aiming to scale single-patient successes like baby KJ’s treatment for rare diseases.

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Kosmos, an AI Scientist, claims 6 months of work in a day — a new agent from FutureHouse spun into Edison Scientific, capable of reading 1,500 papers and writing 42,000 lines of code per run, with 79% reproducibility and seven validated discoveries across neuroscience, materials science, and genetics—enabled by a persistent world model for long-horizon reasoning.

🔹 Atomic-level AI antibody design — David Baker’s lab and Xaira Therapeutics report in Nature AI-generated antibodies built from scratch with atomic precision, using RFdiffusion to target specific epitopes and confirm structures via cryo-EM, marking a step toward rational, modular design in protein therapeutics.

🔹 With OpenFold3, BoltzGen, and Pearl coming out, Woody Sherman (Psivant Therapeutics) highlights three standout takes: Jan Domanski’s State of Co-Folding 2025 on the shift from benchmarks to real-world impact; David Pearlman’s The Great Divergence on OpenFold3 as a foundational, open platform for bio-AI; and Ray Dogum’s OpenFold Released on how open access could accelerate industrial adoption of high-accuracy protein complex modeling.

🔹 CZI Biohub debuts two AI models for virtual biology — VariantFormer, a genomic foundation model trained on 2,300 genomes for cross-tissue expression and disease variant prediction, and scLDM, a diffusion model for high-fidelity single-cell transcript generation to enable virtual experiments across immune and perturbed cell states.

🔹 Rethinking AI in medicine — shared by Jan Beger (GE HealthCare), a new paper in npj Digital Medicine argues that AI tools should augment clinical reasoning rather than focus solely on predictive accuracy, emphasizing bias reduction, interpretability, and integration into real-world team workflows.

🔹 Could black box AI be more trustworthy than explainable models in medicine? — a new Journal of Clinical Epidemiology paper argues that current explainability tools like SHAP can mislead clinicians, suggesting that rigorous validation and outcome performance (not interpretability) should guide trust in AI for healthcare.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

Fresh off announcing an AI supercomputer partnership with NVIDIA, Eli Lilly is expanding its AI push with two new deals:

• $100M drug discovery deal with Insilico Medicine — in a newly formalized collaboration, Lilly and Insilico will jointly apply the Insilico’s AI platform to generate and optimize compounds across selected targets. Earlier, Insilico disclosed eight oral small-molecule programs targeting cardiometabolic diseases as part of a broader push into longevity-linked therapies.

• $345M AI-driven antibody deal with XtalPi’s Ailux — Lilly will use Ailux’s bispecific antibody platform (combining structural modeling, generative design, and developability analytics) for multi-target biologic development, with options to license the tech.

🔹 Also, Eli Lilly partners on RNAi for metabolic diseases — a global collaboration with SanegeneBio to develop RNAi therapies using SanegeneBio’s tissue-selective delivery platform, with the deal worth up to $1.2B in milestones plus royalties.

🔹 Bristol Myers and insitro extend ALS collaboration — BMS will pay up to $20M to extend its AI-driven drug discovery partnership with insitro by one year, aiming to advance a small molecule against a novel ALS target.

🔹 Pfizer to acquire obesity drug developer for $10B — Pfizer outbid Novo Nordisk to acquire Metsera for up to $10B, including milestone payments, after FTC concerns derailed Novo’s rival offer.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 AI healthcare startups see funding surge in 2025 — venture investment in AI-driven health tech has hit $10.7B YTD, up 24% from 2024, with major rounds from Isomorphic Labs ($600M), Lila Sciences ($550M), Abridge ($550M), and OpenEvidence ($610M); Crunchbase data shows startups capturing the bulk of AI spend as adoption accelerates across clinical documentation, RCM, and drug discovery.

🔹 Iambic raises $100M+ to advance AI-discovered drugs — San Diego-based company closed an oversubscribed round following clinical data on its lead HER2-targeted program and a new collaboration with Jazz Pharmaceuticals.

🔹 QIAGEN acquires Parse Biosciences for $225M to scale AI-ready single-cell solutions — Parse, behind the GigaLab platform and datasets like the 100M-cell Tahoe-100M atlas with Tahoe Therapeutics and NVIDIA, is also powering large-scale human lung tissue perturbation atlas with Helmholtz Munich; the deal expands QIAGEN’s sample tech into high-throughput single-cell analysis for AI-driven drug discovery.

🔹 Colossal Biosciences acquires Viagen to expand de-extinction capabilities — known for creating dire wolf-like canids, red wolf clones, and mammoth-inspired embryos in development, Colossal brings Viagen’s high-efficiency cloning and cryopreservation tech under its roof.

🔹 Hippocratic AI raises $126M Series C at $3.5B valuation — Backed by Avenir, a16z, General Catalyst, and CapitalG, the company claims over 115M patient interactions with zero safety incidents, deploying non-diagnostic AI agents across 50+ global healthcare orgs including Cleveland Clinic and Sheba.

🔹 Coherence Neuro raises $10M to merge neurotech and cancer care — Coherence is developing an implantable BCI platform to monitor and treat cancer via the nervous system, aiming to enable real-time prediction models and adaptive therapies.

🔹 Synchron raises $200M to scale non-surgical brain implants — Backed by Double Point Ventures, the BCI company is developing vascularly delivered devices to access multiple brain regions without invasive surgery, positioning itself as a scalable alternative to surgical implants like Neuralink.

🔹 AI-powered care coordination — Tala Health raises $100M to expand its AI agents supporting clinicians across the patient journey, aiming to streamline care from virtual triage to clinician referral, with backing led by Sofreh Capital.

🔹 Revvity to acquire ACD/Labs to bolster Signals software — the deal adds ACD/Labs’ spectral analysis, ADMET prediction, and analytical data tools to Revvity’s Signals platform, expanding capabilities across molecular design, process chemistry, and manufacturing in pharma and materials science.

🔹 arcoris bio raises CHF 6.3M to scale digital pathology platform — backed by Ventura Ace and ZEISS Ventures, the Swiss startup will accelerate industrialization of its nanotech platform which enables high-sensitivity, multiplex biomarker detection for diagnostics and drug discovery.

🔹 Evommune raised $172.5M in its IPO, debuting under the ticker EVMN, as it advances small molecule and biologic therapies for chronic inflammatory diseases, including an oral mast cell-targeting program.

🔹 LambdaVision raises $7M to scale space-made artificial retina — the startup uses microgravity manufacturing aboard the ISS to produce protein-based implants aimed at restoring vision lost to retinal diseases, with funding to advance toward clinical trials.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 INBRAIN partners with Microsoft on AI-driven neurotech — graphene-based BCI company is teaming with Microsoft to develop agentic AI systems for real-time precision neurology, aiming to create adaptive, closed-loop therapeutics for neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and epilepsy.

🔹 Spider-inspired soft robots offer noninvasive gut diagnostics — researchers in Macau have developed a magnetic, rolling microbot modeled on the golden wheel spider, capable of navigating the digestive tract to replace invasive endoscopy, with potential future applications in targeted drug delivery and minimally invasive treatment.

🔹 CRISPR delivery risks resurface in liver toxicity case — Intellia paused two phase 3 trials after a patient death linked to liver injury from its LNP-delivered CRISPR therapy.

🔹 FDA Pulls Back on uniQure’s Huntington’s Gene Therapy Plan — despite phase 1/2 data showing a 75% disease progression slowdown with AMT-130, the FDA now says the external control group is insufficient for accelerated approval.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Arena BioWorks shuts down just 2 years after $500M launch — the private research institute, founded to fund high-risk, Bell Labs–style biomedical science, is closing after failing to sustain its startup spinout-driven business model, despite initial backing to support a decade of operations.

🔹 Recursion appoints Najat Khan as CEO — Co-founder Chris Gibson steps into Board Chair role as the AI-driven biotech marks a leadership transition to guide its next growth phase.

🔹 From Meta to Meta — Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is acquiring EvolutionaryScale’s 50-person team, appointing Alex Rives as CZI’s Head of Science to succeed Steve Quake; no deal terms disclosed. The arc: ex-Meta protein-AI group spun out, raised a $142M seed with no CEO, and now returns via a Biohub acquihire.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 Accipiter Bio debuts with $12.7M and dual-targeting protein drugs — Spun out of Nobel laureate David Baker’s lab, Seattle-based Accipiter Biosciences emerges with AI-designed de novo proteins that bind multiple disease targets at once, securing partnerships with Pfizer (deal worth up to $330M) and Kite Pharma to advance multifunctional therapies for cancer, IBS, and beyond.

Read also:

Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔬 High-dimensional cell mapping for brain disease — Recursion completed its whole-genome Microglia Map with Roche and Genentech, capturing 46M images from 100B cells and 100K CRISPR knockouts to uncover new neurodegeneration targets, triggering a $30M milestone payment.

🔬 AI-guided therapy shows promise after CAR-T failure — Lantern Pharma reports a complete response in a relapsed DLBCL patient treated with LP-284, an AI-developed drug targeting DNA repair deficiencies, highlighting its potential in post-CAR-T and post-bispecific settings with ongoing Phase 1 trials.

• See also: Five AI-driven Drug Discovery Companies Enabling Precision Oncology

🔬 Targeting drug-resistant eye infections — Locus Biosciences partners with Viatris to develop engineered bacteriophage therapies for ophthalmic bacterial infections, aiming to address rising antibiotic resistance using AI-driven phage design.

🔬 AI stack boost for health data — Verily is integrating NVIDIA’s tools into its precision health platform to accelerate genomics and multimodal model training by up to 10x, with initial deployments supporting NIH’s All of Us research program.

🔬 Guardant Health and Zephyr AI partner to combine genomic and clinical data with AI tools to identify biomarkers and predict cancer drug responses.

🔬 Foundation Medicine teams up with Manifold to upgrade its analytics platform and enable faster, AI-powered exploration of genomic data from 800,000+ cancer patients to support drug development.

🔬 Omnimodal AI foundation model — BostonGene to present studies at SITC 2025 (11.05-09) showcasing its omnimodal AI foundation model, which predicts treatment response, toxicity, and resistance mechanisms across cancer types using integrated molecular and clinical data.

🔬 AI meets dual-payload ADCs — Debiopharm partners with South Korea’s NetTargets to develop antibody-drug conjugates that carry two synergistic payloads, using AI to identify combinations that overcome resistance in tough-to-treat cancers.

🔬 Latus Bio is expanding its AI/ML strategy to improve AAV gene therapy design, using data from over 100 million in vivo capsid-tissue combinations. The company aims to apply machine learning to more precisely engineer capsids and payloads for targeted delivery. It also added two experts in protein and peptide modeling—Drs. Pranam Chatterjee and Philip Kim—to its scientific advisory board.

🔬 Pushing open science in virtual cell simulation — Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and NVIDIA expand their partnership to scale AI-driven virtual cell models, releasing open RNA and imaging models, standardized benchmarks, and petabyte-scale GPU tools to support collaborative, reproducible biology research.

🔬 Blood cancer research at scale — Flatiron Health launched six real-world datasets covering over 505,000 U.S. patients with blood cancers, including structured clinical, genomic, and longitudinal data to support AI model development and validation across research and drug discovery.

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🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

💰 Pfizer sues to block rival bid for obesity biotech — Pfizer files lawsuits against Metsera and Novo Nordisk after Novo made a $9B counteroffer to outbid Pfizer’s $7.3B deal.

🔬 Thermo Fisher expands AI-powered drug development — At CPHI Frankfurt, Thermo Fisher unveiled new capabilities under its Accelerator platform, and launched an AI partnership with OpenAI to speed clinical trials.

💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

💰 Roche and Manifold Bio ink a deal worth up to $2B to co-develop AI-designed blood-brain barrier shuttles, aiming to improve CNS drug delivery by pairing Manifold’s in vivo screening and protein design platform with Roche’s clinical development expertise.

💰 Thermo Fisher will acquire Clario for $8.9B, a provider of clinical trial endpoint data solutions, to enhance its digital and AI capabilities in clinical research, expanding services for pharma and biotech customers and deepening its presence in trial data analytics.

💰 Curve Biosciences raises $40M to develop AI-driven blood tests for chronic disease monitoring, using a tissue atlas to train diagnostic models aimed at earlier and more accurate detection.

💰 Tubulis raises $401M to advance ADC pipeline — Germany-based Tubulis closes its Series C round at €344M, adding major institutional investors to accelerate clinical development of its antibody-drug conjugates, including pivotal trials for ovarian cancer and expansion into new tumor types.

💰 Helex raises $3.5M to target genetic kidney diseases — Helex secures seed funding to develop non-viral, kidney-targeted gene therapies, starting with a single-dose treatment for polycystic kidney disease using programmable lipid nanoparticles and AI-guided design.

🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔬 At its second Cancer AI Symposium, Google Cloud showcased how pharma firms (like Eli Lilly), AI firms (e.g. Tempus, Recursion), and nonprofits are using generative and agent-based AI to accelerate compound discovery, real-time clinical guidance, and early diagnostics, with tools like MedGemma and ASCO’s Guidelines Assistant featured as key examples.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🚀 AI meets cell manufacturing — iOrganBio launches from stealth with $2M to develop CellForge, an AI-driven platform for scalable, reproducible cell and organoid production, aiming to accelerate drug discovery and regenerative medicine through precision-engineered human models.

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Recursion’s Whole-Genome Microglia Map for Roche

Recursion’s Microglia Map—built from 46 million images and over 100 billion microglial cells—has been accepted by Roche and Genentech, triggering a $30M milestone payment. This brings total payments from the partnership to $213M, and over $500M across all of Recursion’s collaborations.

This one is Recursion’s second neuroscience map delivered under the Roche–Genentech deal and the sixth phenomap overall. It’s designed to give an unbiased, whole-genome view of microglial biology for applications in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, MS, ALS, and other neurodegenerative programs.

Map highlights:

• ~100,000 sgRNA CRISPR-Cas9 knockouts across 17,000+ genes

• Thousands of small molecules profiled

• 46 million images of hiPSC-derived microglia

• Over 100 billion microglial cells generated

• More than 1 trillion hiPSC-derived cells produced to date for neuroscience work

The work combines Recursion’s automated labs, large-scale perturbation systems, and ML-powered phenomics stack (Recursion OS) to map microglia function at a systems level—intended to surface new, difficult-to-find CNS targets.

AI-Guided In Vivo Screening for Brain Barrier Shuttles

Roche and Manifold Bio agreed to co-develop BBB shuttles for neurological and neurodegenerative programs, with $55 million upfront to Manifold and total milestones that could exceed $2 billion, plus tiered royalties.

• Manifold runs discovery

• Roche takes preclinical, clinical, and commercialization

Manifold keeps rights to use its BBB shuttles on non-licensed targets and can co-fund one candidate for higher royalty participation.

Manifold brings a specific angle with its mDesign platform: AI-guided protein design paired with direct in-vivo readouts using mCodes—peptide barcodes that let teams quantify hundreds of candidates across tissues in a single animal via affinity capture and DNA sequencing.

The system reportedly reaches single-digit picomolar sensitivity, supports 1,000+ barcodes, and enables millions of protein–barcode combinations. Manifold’s system is built to screen BBB shuttles that use different endothelial receptors and to design binders using structure-based models trained on high-throughput binding data.

The platform is also aimed at building an in-vivo “world model”—a predictive system linking protein design choices to whole-body distribution and behavior.

Virtual Cells: Data Strategy & Model Architecture

As more organizations aim to simulate cellular behavior in silico, a split is emerging in how to get there. Virtual cells are positioned to improve target identification, patient stratification, trial design, and biomarker development by testing hypotheses in silico before the wet lab. But success may hinge less on AI model design than on how training data is generated.

A recent In Vivo piece by David Wild highlights four efforts—Xaira, CZI, Recursion, and Noetik—each advancing a distinct data pipeline. Common thread: data strategy is defining the architecture, not the other way around. The piece places near-term commercial use for trial design/biomarkers in roughly 1–3 years, with patient-level simulation further out.

• Xaira (perturbational data at scale). Focused on cause-effect learning via Perturb-seq, Xaira redesigned the workflow (“FiCS perturb-seq”) to reduce stress artifacts in genome-scale runs. It released a large public dataset and is generating proprietary data in iPSC-derived and planned in vivo systems. The aim: build models that prioritize high-confidence hypotheses for experimental validation—spanning target ID, toxicity, and MoA.

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (modular foundations, open platform). CZI is assembling general-purpose models (e.g., TranscriptFormer, GREmLN, rBio) as building blocks for a composable virtual cell. Its platform will host and compare models across the community. Training spans natural variation and perturbations, with validation efforts expected in the next 2–3 years. The focus is on infrastructure, not therapeutics.

• Recursion / Valence Labs (lab-in-the-loop from day one). Recursion integrates automated labs with phenotypic and structural modeling, using a “predict–explain–discover” loop. Lab experiments validate model uncertainty directly (active learning), with emphasis on mechanistic insight. Public datasets include RxRx3 and Phenom models; others remain proprietary for internal drug discovery.

• Noetik (patient tissue first). Instead of cell lines or organoids, Noetik starts with real-world tumor samples (~3,000 patients, ~1 TB each) and uses self-supervised learning to uncover features relevant to response prediction. It’s already working with Agenus on biomarker discovery. A mouse-based PerturbMap system is used to cross-check predictions from human-trained models.

To see how each group frames the tradeoffs and what their approaches reveal about the future of predictive biology—read the full In Vivo piece here.

The push by these four fits into a much larger effort to model biology from first principles through AI. As Mitch Leslie recently noted in Science, the field is shifting from handcrafted systems of equations toward data-hungry foundation models trained on millions of single-cell profiles. Efforts such as the Arc Institute’s new Virtual Cell Challenge aim to benchmark these systems, testing whether they can truly infer causal biology or merely mirror correlations.

Early results suggest that despite the hype, performance still lags behind expectations, although each failure reveals where understanding is thin and data incomplete. The consensus, echoed by researchers from CZI’s Theofanis Karaletsos to Xaira’s Bo Wang, is that the models are still in their infancy, but that rapid gains in multimodal data, benchmarking, and compute will likely make today’s virtual cells look primitive.

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Read also:

‘Google Maps’ of Human Cells

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

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🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Lilly unveils the world’s largest AI factory for drug discovery, designed to train large-scale biomedical foundation and frontier models; select models will be available via TuneLab, an AI platform offering biotech access to $1B worth of proprietary data. The factory also integrates physical and agentic AI to accelerate biomanufacturing, robotics, and in silico drug design.

🔹 Open-source alternative to AlphaFold expands to drug and RNA targets — The OpenFold Consortium has released a preview of OpenFold3, a foundation model for predicting 3D structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and drug-like molecules, trained on over 13 million synthetic and 300K experimental structures, offering full commercial access and modular design for rapid integration across biotech R&D.

🔹 Claude expands into life sciences R&D — Anthropic launched “Claude for Life Sciences,” upgrading its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model with domain-specific tools, scientific connectors, and custom skills to support tasks from research to regulatory workflows.

🔹 Tahoe releases 3B-parameter open-source model for cell biology — Tahoe-x1, a compute-efficient foundation model trained on 100M perturbed single cells, achieving SoTA performance in gene essentiality and cancer program prediction, with full open-source release to support translational discovery.

🔹 New AI model challenges AlphaFold 3 in drug discovery — Genesis Molecular AI (formerly Genesis Therapeutics) unveiled Pearl, a generative model for drug-protein structure prediction that reportedly surpasses AlphaFold 3 on internal and external benchmarks by leveraging synthetic physics-based data and NVIDIA-backed infrastructure for industrial deployment.

🔹 Toward Universal Binder Design — MIT expands Boltz AI suite with BoltzGen for universal therapeutic design. Building on Boltz-1 (structure prediction) and Boltz-2 (binding affinity), BoltzGen enables open-source, all-atom generation of protein and peptide binders across modalities and targets, with nanomolar hits experimentally validated by 26 partners.

🔬 Universal model for molecular design — A global academic team has released ODesign, a foundation model capable of designing proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, and metal ions for any biological target, achieving 50x higher throughput than previous tools and compressing days of design work into hours.

🔹 AI kills colon cancer stem cells by reprogramming them — UCSD researchers used a machine learning framework to restore lost gene expression in tumor stem cells, triggering self-destruction and reducing recurrence risk in patient-derived models.

🔹 AI uncovers new ALS drug target — insitro, led by Daphne Koller, has advanced its first AI-discovered therapeutic target for ALS into small-molecule development in partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, using human cell models and machine learning to identify and optimize disease-relevant interventions.

🔹 Cellarity shares Science blueprint for AI + transcriptomics drug discovery — The Flagship-founded startup published a framework in Science describing its AI-driven, single-cell transcriptomic platform to design cell state–correcting drugs. The approach improved hit recovery 13–17x over conventional screens. The team also open-sourced 1.26M-cell datasets to accelerate external benchmarking. First clinical candidate (for sickle cell) is in phase 1.

🔹 Genomics launches Mystra to scale human genetics in drug discovery — Unveiled at ASHG 2025, the AI-driven platform integrates genotype-phenotype data to improve target validation and trial design, aiming to boost R&D success rates and reduce drug development costs.

🔹 Modeling the “social networks” of cells — Bo Wang, Head of Biomedical AI at $1B AI drug discovery startup Xaira Therapeutics, and researchers from University Health Network and University of Toronto, have developed a graph-based deep learning tool that predicts cell-to-cell communication using single-cell RNA data and protein interaction networks, offering improved performance across diverse biological contexts.

🔹 Cell BioEngines joins NVIDIA for Startups to build AI platform for HLA matching — As first-gen cell therapies face commercial collapse, Cell BioEngines is betting on HLA-guided, off-the-shelf allogeneic models.

🔹 Understanding may be out of reach—but control isn’t — Kim Branson, Global Head of AI at GSK, argues that biology’s complexity may defy full reverse-engineering due to computational irreducibility and chaos, suggesting the future lies in controlling rather than fully understanding biological systems using AI-driven, experiment-in-the-loop approaches.

🔹 In GEN interview, David Baker separates AI protein design hype from reality — The Nobel laureate says designing proteins from scratch is now possible, but AI’s true impact on medicine depends on unraveling biology’s complexity.

🔹 Ion channels built from scratch — Scientists in David Baker’s lab at the Institute for Protein Design, led by Yulai Liu, have designed functional calcium-selective ion channels entirely from scratch using AI tools, demonstrating that even complex, poorly understood biological functions can now be engineered from first principles.

🔹 BioRender’s vetted visual tools now live inside Anthropic’s Claude for Life Sciences, enabling real-time generation of publication-ready figures and experimental diagrams.

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💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Novartis acquires RNA biotech Avidity for $12B to expand its neuromuscular RNA pipeline, paying a 45% premium in a major bet on RNA delivery technology and neuroscience.

🔹 UK-based Chemify raises $50M+ to scale AI-driven molecule manufacturing — Backed by Wing VC and Insight Partners, Chemify will expand its automated “Chemifarm” facilities and “Chemputation” platform for on-demand molecular design.

🔹 London-based GHO Capital raised over $2.9B for its fourth fund, its largest yet, to expand investments in scalable manufacturing, medtech, and health tech, with a growing focus on AI-enabled platforms and biopharma services.

🔹 At the start of this month, the NIH launched a major push to standardize organoids — With a $87M investment, the new SOM Center aims to make lab-grown human tissue models reproducible and scalable using AI, robotics, and open protocols, accelerating drug testing and reducing reliance on animal models.

⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Consumer BCI hits research-grade standards — Neurable becomes the first consumer brain-computer interface to meet iMotions’ scientific validation criteria, marking a major leap toward accessible, high-fidelity neurotech after 14 years of R&D and military-backed validation.

🔹 Altman’s rumored Merge Labs eyes noninvasive brain-AI interface — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly backing Merge Labs, a stealth venture developing ultrasound-based brain sensing to enable “think-to-ChatGPT” communication, aiming for a soft, read-only human-AI merge without surgery, contrasting Neuralink’s invasive approach. Read more on the topic in our BCI deep dive.

🔹 Kidney organoids take a leap toward physiological function — new study in Cell Stem Cell (Huang et al.) reports the most advanced kidney organoids yet. When implanted in mice, they integrated with host vasculature and began filtering blood.

🔹 From digital design to printed biomaterials — new open-source 3D printer dubbed BEAVER enables low-cost, dual-extrusion printing of biotic materials like pectin, chitosan, and cellulose.

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Healthcare leads AI adoption, with startups capturing 85% of spend — Menlo Ventures reports U.S. healthcare AI use has surged 7–10x since 2023, now outpacing all other sectors at 2.2x the broader economy. Hospitals drive $1B of $1.4B in spend, targeting documentation, coding, and prior auth. Startups dominate, while EHR incumbents scramble to catch up.

🔹 China’s biotech velocity — Chinese team developed a novel circular RNA modality embedding aptamers for carrier-free delivery, then jumped from rodent studies to a 9-person FIH trial—collecting ~500k human single-cell transcriptomes to map immune responses.

🔹 Formulation as a design problem — Christine Allen, founder of Intrepid Labs, argues that AI and automation are transforming drug formulation from trial-and-error into a multi-objective design process, enabling faster, scalable, and patient-tailored therapies. Intrepid emerged from stealth in May 2025 with $11M.

🔹 10x Genomics, Roche, and Prognosys sue Illumina over spatial and single-cell patents — filing two federal lawsuits alleging Illumina infringed nine patents tied to spatial biology and single-cell tech, reigniting IP battles just months after settling with other rivals.

🚀 A New Kid on the Block

(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)

🔹 Flagship unveils $50M-backed AI startup targeting undruggable proteins — Expedition Medicines launches with a generative covalent chemistry platform combining quantum modeling and chemoproteomics to design small molecules for hard-to-drug targets, starting with a prostate cancer program under Flagship’s partnership with Pfizer.

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Cover image: NVIDIA/Lilly blog of the announcement https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/lilly-ai-factory-nvidia-blackwell-dgx-superpod/

Read also:

‘Google Maps’ of Human Cells

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 AI-designed HER2 drug shows early promise — Iambic reports early clinical responses from its AI-generated HER2 inhibitor in a Phase 1/1b trial, with activity in hard-to-treat cancers including brain metastases, advancing a compound developed from discovery to human dosing in under two years.

🔹 Google DeepMind and Yale release Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B, a large foundation model for single-cell analysis that Google says discovered and validated a novel immunotherapy-relevant effect of a CK2 inhibitor, boosting antigen presentation only in immune-responsive tumor environments.

🔹 Thermo Fisher will integrate OpenAI tools across its operations, including clinical research and drug development.

🔹 Owkin launches K Pro, an AI co-pilot for drug development that uses biological LLMs and multimodal data to speed decision-making, cutting target ID time by 70% and offering natural language queries for researchers and execs.

🔹 Benchling brings NVIDIA AI to the lab bench — integrating NVIDIA’s BioNeMo and OpenFold2 models via NIM microservices, and enabling scientists to run GPU-optimized protein prediction and biomolecular models directly within their existing R&D workflows.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Takeda expands its partnership with Nabla Bio in a deal worth over $1B biobucks to co-develop AI-generated protein therapeutics, using Nabla’s JAM platform to accelerate de novo antibody design for hard-to-treat diseases.

🔹 AstraZeneca partners with Immunai in a deal worth up to $85M to develop inflammatory bowel disease therapies using Immunai’s AI-driven single-cell immune profiling platform.

🔹 First Alzheimer’s blood test cleared for primary care — Roche’s Elecsys pTau181 becomes the only FDA-cleared blood-based test to help rule out Alzheimer’s-related amyloid pathology in patients with cognitive decline, offering 97.9% negative predictive value.

🔹 insitro and Bristol Myers Squibb extend their ALS collaboration with up to $20M in new funding to develop small-molecule therapies using insitro’s machine learning platform.

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💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Lila Sciences raises an additional $115M, including backing from Nvidia, bringing total funding to $350M for its AI-powered robotic labs aiming to automate scientific research across biotech, materials, and diagnostics.

🔹 AI and CNS drug discovery — Bexorg raises $42.5M to scale its AI platform trained on postmortem whole-human brains to improve CNS drug development by generating more predictive targets and biomarkers for conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

🔹 Town Hall Ventures raises $440M for AI-driven health equity — launching its Fund IV to back startups using AI and tech to improve healthcare access for underserved U.S. communities.

🔹 From manual to robotic compounding — After raising €6.7M this spring, Finnish healthtech firm CurifyLabs has launched upgraded software for its 3D printing-based compounding system to speed up and standardize personalized drug manufacturing in hospitals and pharmacies.

🔹 Targeting endometriosis at the tissue level — UK-based Cyclana Bio raises £5M in pre-seed funding to advance a whole tissue-based drug discovery platform for endometriosis, combining clinical samples and AI to identify extracellular matrix-driven therapeutic targets.

🔹 $20M to speed drug approvals — San Francisco-based Weave Bio secures $20M in Series A funding to expand its AI-native platform that automates regulatory workflows across the therapeutic lifecycle.

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⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Gene therapy for natural hearing — Regeneron reports new phase 1/2 data showing sustained hearing gains in most children treated with its AAV gene therapy for genetic deafness, with FDA filing expected later this year.

🔹 RNA-Seq for $50 — Plasmidsaurus launches an ultrafast RNA sequencing service priced at $50 per sample for academia, offering 3-day turnaround, no library prep, and built-in analytics, aiming to make transcriptomics as routine as plasmid sequencing.

🔹 Peptide-siRNA tech crosses into the brain — ProteinQure reports broad CNS distribution of its peptide-siRNA conjugates in non-human primates, outperforming lipid-based delivery in some cell types.

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 When helpfulness backfires — A new study in npj Digital Medicine finds that leading LLMs often generate false medical information when prompted with illogical requests, due to sycophantic behavior, but targeted prompting and fine-tuning can reduce this risk while preserving overall model performance.

🔹 Aging research reaches a turning point — co‑founder , writing after this year’s ARDD 2025 meeting, highlights three transformative ideas in longevity science: GLP‑1 drugs emerging as scalable “healthspan” therapeutics, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis as a regulatory proxy for aging trials, and the gut microbiome as a central, treatable driver of biological aging.

Lipid Brain Atlas

A new preprint from Giovanni D’Angelo’s lab (EPFL), led by Luca Fusar Bassini, introduces the Lipid Brain Atlas—a high-resolution spatial map of membrane lipids across the adult mouse brain. The team used lipidomic profiling to chart biochemical territories without relying on anatomical priors.

They call these territories lipizones, regions defined purely by lipid composition. The authors report that lipid patterns alone can predict 3D coordinates in the mouse brain. Many lipizones line up with cell-type territories or with long-range connectivity, linking cell bodies to distant axon terminals. The map also shifts with physiological state—pregnancy coincides with coordinated changes across cortex and white matter.

The atlas is open-access and may provide a new reference for studying how metabolism and membrane biochemistry vary by brain region, cell type, and physiological state.

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European Clinical Trial Map

Peter Arlett (European Medicines Agency) highlighted that more than 10,000 clinical trials have now been assessed through the EU Clinical Trials Regulation since its launch in early 2022.

As of now, nearly 4,000 trials are actively recruiting participants, and a public-facing Trial Map (launched in March 2025) lets users search by geography and indication.

The map, part of the ACT EU initiative, is meant to improve trial transparency and accessibility across regions.

In parallel, regulators recently set new 2030 targets aimed at expanding the number of multinational trials and accelerating recruitment timelines.

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Read also:

‘Google Maps’ of Human Cells

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology

If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:

Subscribe

🤖 AI x Bio

(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)

🔹 Benchmarking AI for cell modeling—Backed by over $1B in funding, Xaira Therapeutics published a Nature Biotechnology paper introducing the Systema framework to evaluate AI models of cellular perturbations, showing that broad systemic effects often overshadow gene-specific changes and that its fine-tuned scGPT outperformed existing approaches.

🔹 Big pharma doubles down on AI reasoning—a week after unveiling an R&D partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Canada’s BenchSci signed a three-year deal to license its neurosymbolic AI platform to Sanofi, embedding structured, knowledge-graph–driven discovery tools across the pharma giant’s global preclinical research teams. (See our case study: How BenchSci’s ASCEND Builds a Map for Biomedical Reasoning)

🔹 Seattle-based startup Potato, which raised $4.5M earlier this year to build AI tools for lab automation, has partnered with Wiley to integrate 25,000+ validated methods from Current Protocols.

🔹 Mapping the brain—UCSF and the Allen Institute created a transformer-based model that mapped 1,300 mouse brain regions from spatial transcriptomics data, producing one of the most detailed, data-driven brain atlases to date and revealing new, biologically validated subregions.

🔹 AI drug rescue for failed clinical assets—Cambridge-based Ignota Labs acquired Kronos Bio’s discontinued CDK9 and SYK inhibitor programs, aiming to use its SAFEPATH AI platform to identify and fix toxicity issues that halted development.

🔹 Alpenglow Biosciences and Virdx have partnered to develop AI-powered prostate cancer diagnostics, combining Alpenglow’s 3D pathology imaging with Virdx’s MRI-based detection, powered by Nvidia’s GPU tech to create large-scale 3D datasets and accelerate clinical validation.

🔹 Spain’s MEDSIR is partnering with Ataraxis AI to integrate predictive algorithms into its breast cancer studies. The collaboration grants Ataraxis access to outcomes from over 1,000 patients. Read our in-depth interview with MEDSIR’s Business Development Director Rui Rui Zhang Xiang.

🔹 Pfizer’s Julian Cremer introduced FLOWR.root, a foundation model for 3D ligand generation and affinity prediction, emphasizing that benchmark results often reflect memorization rather than true generalization. He argues models must evolve with new experimental data, positioning FLOWR.root as a continuously fine-tunable companion tool for real-world drug discovery. (data, code)

🔹 Scaling single-cell and multi-omics research—Tempus AI joined Parse Biosciences’ service provider network to offer single-cell sequencing as part of its multi-omics platform. The partnership builds on Parse’s scalable Evercode technology and its Gigalab facility—recently key to generating the Tahoe100M single-cell dataset.

🔹 Natural language to lab automation—Biomni, an open-source biomedical AI agent, partnered with Retro Bio to integrate PyLabRobot, enabling generation of Hamilton STAR liquid-handling protocols from plain English; follows recent integrations with Consensus for literature analysis and Sage Bionetworks for natural language access to 3 PB of biomedical data.

🚜 Market Movers

(News from established pharma and tech giants)

🔹 Novo exits cell therapy research—Novo Nordisk is shutting down its 250-person cell therapy division, including a Type 1 diabetes program, as part of CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar’s $1.3B cost-cutting plan that will cut 9,000 jobs and refocus R&D on obesity and metabolic disease.

🔹 Parkinson’s cell therapy—BlueRock Therapeutics, acquired by Bayer in 2019 for up to $1B, reported 36-month Phase I data showing durable safety and motor improvement from its stem-cell-derived dopaminergic therapy bemdaneprocel. The update comes just three weeks after dosing the first patient in its pivotal Phase III trial—the world’s first late-stage study of an allogeneic pluripotent stem-cell therapy for Parkinson’s disease.

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💰 Money Flows

(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)

🔹 Biotech pivots to AI drug discovery—Shuttle Pharmaceuticals plans a $10M cash-and-stock acquisition of Molecule.ai, marking its entry into the $3.2B AI-driven pharma market and expanding beyond radiotherapy toward ML–based drug development.

🔹 Family-led RNA revival—Soufflé Therapeutics, co-founded by Robert Langer and family, launched with a $200M Series A and over $3.5B in total partnerships with AbbVie, Amgen, Bayer, and Novo Nordisk to develop targeted, cell-specific siRNA therapies for metabolic and genetic diseases, aiming for clinical entry in 2026.

🔹 US boosts next-gen immune engineering—ARPA-H awarded over $170M across projects advancing in vivo cell therapies, funding newly launched ImmunoVec ($40.7M), Tessera Therapeutics, Kernal Bio ($48M), and Cytiva to develop nonviral DNA, mRNA, and CRISPR delivery systems that reprogram immune cells directly inside the body for cancer and autoimmune diseases.

🔹 Italy’s Chiesi Group will pay up to $115M for global rights to Arbor Biotechnologies’ gene-editing therapy with potential downstream payments topping $2B, marking a bet on one-time treatments for rare kidney disorders.

🔹 Bristol Myers Squibb will acquire Orbital Therapeutics for $1.5B, expanding into RNA-delivered, in vivo CAR-T therapies led by a preclinical CD19 autoimmune program.

🔹 European healthtech goes global—Lauxera Capital closed its €400M Lauxera Growth II fund to scale European healthtech innovators internationally, already backing Acandis and Antaros Medical, and continuing its hands-on, transatlantic model that helped drive OrganOx’s $1.5B exit to Terumo.

🔹 LongeVC doubles down on longevity biotech—a month after revealing plans to raise $120M for its second fund amid a tight VC market, LongeVC officially launched Fund II, backing translational longevity and deep-tech startups. Its first investment, an €80M Series A in Trogenix, supports genetic therapies for aggressive cancers like glioblastoma, co-led by IQ Capital with participation from Eli Lilly and Cancer Research Horizons.

🔹 Massive boost for UK science hub—Oracle founder Larry Ellison will invest an additional £890M to expand his Oxford research institute into a 2M sq ft campus for 7,000 people, aiming to tackle global challenges like health, food security, and climate change, with projected economic benefits worth billions.

🔹 AI drug discovery firm embraces crypto strategy — Predictive Oncology raised $343.5M through private financings combining cash and Aethir’s ATH tokens to fund a new digital asset treasury and create a “Strategic Compute Reserve,” tying its AI drug discovery platform to decentralized GPU infrastructure.

🔹 Next-gen protein degraders—Leash Biosciences signed a multi-target collaboration withto supply novel chemistries for degrader discovery against hard-to-drug targets. The partnership follows Monte Rosa’s up-to-$5.7B deal with Novartis and builds on its AI/ML discovery engine which uses geometric deep learning to map protein surfaces and design highly selective molecular glue degraders.

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⚙️ Other Tech

(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)

🔹 Circuit-level control of immunity—Nilo Therapeutics launched with $101M to modulate mapped vagal–brain “master regulator” circuits that gate systemic inflammation—aiming for multi-pathway immune reset vs. single-cytokine drugs. Founded by Zuker, Medzhitov, and Liberles, the NY startup is building labs and advancing preclinical programs with backing from The Column Group, DCVC Bio, Lux, the Gates Foundation, and Alexandria.

🔹 Gene therapy pioneer targets the rarest diseases—James Wilson’s GEMMABio launched Rare Therapeutics, a spinout developing gene therapies for ultra-orphan CNS disorders (e.g., GM1 gangliosidosis, Krabbe disease).

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🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society

(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)

🔹 Publishers tighten controls on open-data studies—PLOS, Frontiers, and other journals are now automatically rejecting most papers using public health datasets like NHANES unless researchers provide external validation, after thousands of suspect, AI-generated studies flooded submissions; the move aims to curb paper mills but raises concerns about access for legitimate scientists.

🔹 U.S. precision oncology flywheel—DeciBio’s Andrew Aijian highlights how leading U.S. diagnostics firms are linking assays, multiomic databases, pharma partnerships, and algorithm development into a connected “flywheel” model. Companies like Caris, Tempus, Foundation Medicine, Guardant, and Natera are using this approach to improve biomarker discovery and assay utilization, though questions remain around reimbursement, data ownership, and global scalability.

🔹 Owkin and STAT Brand Studio released a Pulse Check report surveying 200 U.S. and European pharma leaders on agentic AI, exploring how self-directed AI systems that can plan and act autonomously are reshaping strategies, budgets, and adoption barriers across drug discovery and clinical research.

🔹 UC sets Nobel world record—University of California researchers won five Nobel Prizes in three days (in medicine, physics, and chemistry) marking the first time four faculty from one institution earned Nobels in a single year and bringing UC’s total to 75.

🔹 In 2025, big pharma’s median upfront payment for Phase I licensing deals hit $350M (over double 2024 levels) while preclinical and Phase II deal activity remained strong and platform partnerships stayed steady, per DealForma data.

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AI for Science is a Social Problem

Hugging Face researchers Georgia Channing and Avijit Ghosh argue that the main barriers slowing AI’s impact on scientific discovery are social and institutional rather than compute, data, or model quality. They describe four obstacles:

They call for shared spaces and collaborative infrastructure to bridge divides between machine learning and domain scientists, an effort now taking shape in their new hugging-science community.

The authors describe four obstacles:

• Community breakdowns that prevent collaboration

• Research incentives that misalign with high-leverage upstream needs

• Fragmented and incompatible datasets

• Infrastructure access gaps that reinforce existing institutional privilege

A central issue is communication failure between machine learning researchers and scientists. ML developers often focus on predictive performance, while domain scientists seek mechanistic understanding, leading to mismatches in goals and validation criteria. These gaps are worsened by a lack of interdisciplinary educational resources.

There’s also undervaluing of infrastructure and data contributions. While model iterations are often short-lived, well-curated datasets and shared tools can have long-term utility, yet they rarely receive comparable recognition in funding or career advancement.

Another key challenge is scientific data tokenization. Unlike text, where tokens are naturally defined and models can exploit local context, scientific datasets (like multi-omics, pathology images, or molecular structures) often lack clear token boundaries and require far larger context windows to capture meaningful relationships.

This results in poor performance from standard transformer architectures, even when data volume is high. The authors emphasize that biological systems in particular often involve long-range spatial or temporal dependencies that current models fail to represent effectively.

Some of the proposed solutions: building standardized interfaces for scientific ML workflows, establishing community benchmarks for upstream computational bottlenecks, prioritizing open data formats, and investing in sustainable, community-owned infrastructure.

The authors argue that unless these social foundations are addressed, technical advances alone will not democratize or accelerate scientific discovery.

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Independently Benchmarking Healthcare AI

Quick note on ARiSE: a Stanford- and Harvard-backed lab launched in 2024 to independently evaluate healthcare AI, with a stated focus on clinical reasoning, safety, and explainability rather than raw model scores. The group says it intends to stay non-commercial.

This year, ARiSE reports three main results:

• A Nature Medicine paper found large language models could assist physician reasoning in complex vignettes.

• An August NEJM AI study introduced MedAgentBench (appeared in preprints earlier this year)—300 physician-written patient tasks run in an agentic setup; where most models did better on query-based than action-based tasks; Claude 3.5 Sonnet led with a 69.67% overall success rate.

• A third study comparing LLMs with board-certified physicians across emergency triage, initial evaluation, and admission scenarios reported LLMs outperforming physicians in all three.

Alongside ARiSE’s independent work, OpenAI has built HealthBench with 5,000 physician-graded health conversations contributed by 262 clinicians across 60 countries. Google’s benchmark spans over 11,000 personas covering diverse diseases, regions, languages, and clinical contexts.

As benchmarks take shape, diagnostics is one area where these models are already being used: our a recent deep dive profiles 22 companies and Microsoft’s MAI-DxO, reportedly at 85.5% on 304 NEJM cases using five LLM agents.

Convergence of AI and CRISPR

In her latest Tech for the Rare column at , Louise von Stechow examines how AI is beginning to intersect with CRISPR gene editing—an emerging convergence with major implications for rare disease therapy. She traces the arc from Casgevy, Vertex’s 2023-approved therapy for sickle cell disease and β-thalassemia, to CRISPR-GPT, a Stanford-, Princeton-, and DeepMind-led AI agent that helped novice researchers reach up to 80% editing efficiency in cell experiments.

Louise also notes how AstraZeneca’s $555 million deal with Algen Biotechnologies reflects growing interest in AI-driven CRISPR platforms for gene–disease mapping, and how Profluent’s OpenCRISPR-1, an AI-designed nuclease differing by 403 mutations from SpCas9, reportedly cut off-target edits by 95%. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Arbor Biotechnologies’ $115 million upfront partnership with Chiesi focuses on CRISPR editing for rare diseases, bringing the field’s industrial potential into sharper view.

The author frames the field as promising but early: CRISPR and AI are starting to reinforce each other, but their convergence is still experimental—raising as many technical and ethical questions as it does possibilities for rare disease research.

Full Story

Cover: Melencolia I, Albrecht Dürer, 1514, fragment focusing on the polyhedron. The polyhedron’s identity remains unresolved—a stretched, twice-truncated cube (often called a triangular trapezohedron) is a common model, but after 500 years the “Dürer solid” is still a puzzle with competing readings and no explanation from Dürer.

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‘Google Maps’ of Human Cells

AI Protein Design: Platforms, Specialists, Modular Tools

The ‘Holy Grail’ of Digital Biology