Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #10
ALSO: Private Biotech M&As Take Over IPO Trend; Large Cellular Models; On Measuring the Immune System; Ethics of Bio-Hybrid Robotics; 5 AI Companies Enabling Precision Immunotherapy
Hi! I am Andrii Buvailo, and this is my weekly newsletter, ‘Where Tech Meets Bio,’ where I talk about technologies, breakthroughs, and great companies moving the biopharma industry forward.
If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If the latter is the case, subscribe by pressing this button:
Now, let’s get to this week’s topics!
Quick News Highlights
🚀 Flagship Pioneering launches Abiologics with $50M to develop synthetic proteins called Synteins, aiming to improve drug stability, enable oral dosing, and enhance cell penetration by using mirror image amino acids.
🔬 Researchers at King's College London and the EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have developed the most comprehensive Gut Microbiome Atlas, offering unprecedented insights into global gut health by profiling microbiomes from over 250,000 samples worldwide.
📈 Johnson & Johnson's Tecvayli and Talvey are projected to be the top-selling bispecific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) by 2030, with J&J dominating the BiTE market and accounting for 40% of sales. BiTEs are forecast to generate $20.6 billion by 2030, marking a 1,320% increase from 2023.
🚀 Briefly Bio raises $1.2M to develop an AI-powered platform similar to GitHub for making scientific experiments and data more reproducible, with the goal of solving the reproducibility crisis by enabling easier sharing and collaboration
🔬 Paige, in collaboration with Microsoft, published a major study in Nature Medicine showcasing Virchow, the first million-slide foundation model for cancer detection. Virchow demonstrated clinical-grade performance across 16 cancer types, including rare cancers, using AI-driven pathology to detect intricate cancer patterns.
💻 Insilico Medicine introduces DORA, an AI assistant for drafting medical research papers, leveraging multiple LLMs to aid early-career researchers and non-native English speakers, with a free trial available later this year.
The company also launched an open-source AI program Precious-3 GPT to predict drug sensitivity and cellular interactions in aging and related diseases by analyzing clinical data and published research.
🔬 Touchlight has licensed its enzymatic doggybone DNA (dbDNA™) technology to GSK, enabling rapid and scalable GMP production of DNA templates for mRNA-based products.
🔬 Gilead's Sunlenca twice-yearly injections showed 100% effectiveness in preventing HIV in a study of 5,000 women and girls in South Africa and Uganda, marking a significant advancement in HIV prevention.
💰 4D Medicine, a UK-based spin-out from the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick, raised £3.4M in Series A funding to complete pre-clinical testing and seek FDA clearance for its resorbable biomaterial, 4Degra, which degrades without harmful by-products.
🔬 Schrödinger, backed by a $10M Gates Foundation grant, launches an initiative to enhance its computational platform for predictive toxicology using Nvidia's AI technologies to reduce drug development failures by predicting toxicology risks early and improving drug safety.
🔬 SandboxAQ partners with Nvidia to boost its quantitative AI for drug discovery and other industries, combining Nvidia's CUDA-accelerated DMRG algorithm with SandboxAQ’s large quantitative models (LQMs).
🔬 Inbrain Neuroelectronics, a Barcelona-based startup, has developed a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) using graphene, promising high-resolution brain signal reading and stimulation without the issues of traditional metal BCIs.
Private Biotech M&As Take Over IPO Trend
At the start of 2024, the biotech industry witnessed a renewed sense of optimism with a surge in investor cash and a pickup in initial public offerings (IPOs). However, as the year progressed, the momentum in IPOs slowed down. Instead, there has been a notable increase in private biotech mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
This shift reflects the current market dynamics where pharmaceutical companies are capitalizing on the abundance of mature, yet private, drug startups.
Key Takeaways
Surge in Private M&A: In 2024, private biotech acquisitions have surged, driven by an abundance of mature drug startups that have not yet gone public. As of mid-July, 13 out of 26 acquisitions worth at least $50 million were of private biotechs, surpassing the pace of the previous six years.
Deal Size and Value: The size of these deals has also increased significantly. Seven deals this year have exceeded $1 billion in total value, with the median size of upfront cash involved being more than three times the average of the past six years.
Market Dynamics: The slowdown in the IPO market and the need for pharmaceutical companies to build their pipelines amid looming patent expirations have driven this trend. The current market conditions have led to what analysts describe as a "valuation capitulation" by private biotech companies and their investors.
Examples of Major Deals: Notable acquisitions include Biogen’s $1.15 billion purchase of Hi-Bio, which remained private while advancing its drug candidates through successful Phase 2 trials. Another example is Celsius Therapeutics, which sold to AbbVie after encountering funding difficulties and completing a Phase 1 trial.
Investor Sentiment: Investors backing private biotechs are increasingly open to M&A deals due to the uncertain IPO prospects. These deals offer an alternative path to liquidity and returns for investment firms.
Future Prospects
The trend of private biotech acquisitions is likely to continue as pharmaceutical companies seek to bolster their pipelines with new drug candidates, especially in light of impending patent expirations for many top-selling medicines.
The increased comfort level of pharma companies with private market deals suggests that more advanced drug prospects could be acquired at potentially lower costs than if they were publicly traded. This dynamic presents opportunities for both biotech startups and their investors to achieve substantial returns while navigating a challenging IPO market.
The Promise of Large Cellular Models (LCMs)
Quantitative Biology journal published "Current Opinions on Large Cellular Models," authored by scholars from China, the US, and Canada, focusing on advancements in the growing fieldc of LCMs.
Large cellular models (LCMs) like scBERT, Geneformer, scGPT, scFoundation, and GeneCompass, inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) in NLP, have been developed for single-cell transcriptomics. These LCMs have demonstrated potential in various biological tasks.
Key Idea or Technology
These models utilize large-scale pre-training technologies to process and analyze single-cell data with high precision. The commentary provides a detailed overview of the general framework and core AI concepts that underpin these models, highlighting their capacity to offer unprecedented insights into biological processes.
LCMs are pretrained on massive single-cell transcriptomic datasets using transformer architectures and self-supervised strategies like masked modeling or autoregressive generative modeling.
The models predict gene expression values by converting genes and their expressions into embeddings and optimizing learnable parameters to minimize the loss function.
Measuring the Immune System
In a recent Newsletter edition “Why We Need an Immunome,” Eric Topol highlights the urgent problem of inadequate tools for assessing the immune system, which limits our ability to predict health outcomes and personalize treatments.
Despite the significant progress in immune research, traditional metrics like the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) remain insufficient for detailed immune profiling.
Cutting-edge solutions, such as IMM-AGE, iAge, and the Immune Health Metric (IHM), leverage AI and multi-omic data to provide a deeper understanding of immune markers and their correlation with health. For example, iAge's identification of CXCL9 as a key regulator of endothelial aging opens new therapeutic possibilities. However, integrating these advanced diagnostics into clinical practice remains a challenge.
The key message is that developing a practical, affordable immunome could revolutionize personalized medicine, offering better guidance for treatments in cancer, long COVID, and age-related diseases, ultimately improving our understanding and management of immune health.
Is Bio-Hybrid Robotics Ethical?
Researchers from the University of Southampton, along with collaborators from the US and Spain, are advocating for regulation and public debate on the ethical and responsible development of bio-hybrid robotics, an emerging field that combines living tissue with synthetic components.
Key Takeaways:
The multidisciplinary team identified three unique ethical issues in bio-hybrid robotics: Interactivity with humans and the environment, Integrability with human bodies, and Moral status, emphasizing the complexity and novelty of these challenges.
The paper, titled "Ethics and responsibility in bio-hybrid robotics research" and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights that out of over 1,500 publications on bio-hybrid robotics, only five deeply considered ethical implications, showcasing a significant gap in the discourse.
The Biohybrid Futures project, led by Dr. Rafael Mestre, aims to develop a framework for responsible research and governance of bio-hybrid robotics, underscoring the need for risk assessments, consideration of social implications, and increased public awareness and understanding.
Five AI-driven Drug Discovery Companies Enabling Precision Immunotherapy
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is steadily making its presence felt across various sectors, including the pharmaceutical industry. Among the multiple applications of AI in this field, immunotherapy - a treatment method that utilizes the body's immune system to combat diseases, notably cancer - is seeing a significant influence. The integration of AI can potentially enhance treatments and patient care by making it more precise and personalized.