Solving humanity’s biggest problems has been OpenAI’s stated reason for pursuing artificial general intelligence since its 2015 founding, and over time, life science challenges have crystallized as core parts of its vision. In February 2025, CEO Sam Altman wrote that “we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases,” and by that September…

Agentic AI company Owkin and Sanofi have extended their collaboration with a five-year license for K Pro, Owkin’s AI scientist, under which Owkin will lead the end-to-end development of novel, purpose-built biopharma agents for Sanofi. Owkin pitches K Pro as a system that reasons over biological data and orchestrates AI agents to run research and…

After securing $65 billion in Series H funding and achieving a $965 billion post-money valuation, Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement for a proposed IPO to access more capital. Today, the company floated the idea of a pause on model development. “We believe it would be good for the world to have the…

On a clear night in early 2019, in his hometown in China, Jie Yang, Ph.D., was thinking about how galaxies merge. In essence, they combine through mass, distance and gravity, with nothing else involved. Yang, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Sydney, asked whether a clustering method could group itself the same…

Blue Origin’s uncrewed New Glenn rocket exploded during a hotfire test at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station last week. No casualties were reported, but the incident destroyed the rocket and damaged the launch infrastructure.  The explosion could also threaten the timeline of NASA’s Artemis program, as Blue Origin is one of two primary contractors, alongside…

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a 400-page document last week outlining proposed revisions to the administration of federal awards. The document proposes expanding agency authority to monitor awards from pre-application through closeout and increasing the influence of political appointees and the White House over award decisions.  “The OMB’s proposed rule is an…

The Newport Beach, California diagnostics company Mammogen has raised up to $30 million in Series A financing led by a major U.S. public retirement system to advance genTRU-breast. The technology is an RNA-powered blood test for earlier breast cancer detection in women with dense breast tissue, where mammograms are harder to read and patients often…

Under the leadership of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Department of Health and Human Services has endured the departure of top officials at the CDC, FDA and NIH as well as significant staff reductions across the agency. This could erode American science as scientists look to move abroad. More than 75% of scientists who…

Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NASA are reportedly imposing new limitations on international scientific collaborations. NIH is allegedly directing grantees to ask permission for any co-authorship with a scholar affiliated with a foreign institution, while NASA has reportedly told some grantees that papers co-authored with researchers in China may violate…

Nature issued new guidelines expanding the types of research and research fields that can use the Registered Report format.  Registered Reports are a format for empirical articles in which the hypotheses, methods and planned analyses undergo peer review before the research is conducted. Previously, Nature only considered these reports for confirmatory research in cognitive neuroscience…

Atomis, a Japanese startup advised by 2025 Nobel laureate Susumu Kitagawa, is bringing Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) to applications such as CO2 capture, refrigerant recycling and next-generation deodorization and coatings. One tool they are using to accomplish this is an AI-powered simulation platform from Matlantis.  MOFs have struggled to move beyond the lab due to…

SK Telecom said on June 1 that it has put SK hynix’s semiconductor fabs into a digital twin built on NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, with commercialization to follow in stages under SK hynix’s “Autonomous Fab 2030” roadmap. SK hynix’s news is part of a trend involving Omniverse-based fab twins. SK hynix and SKT first surfaced the…

Still interested in entering the 2026 R&D 100 Awards this year? The final deadline to submit nominations for the 2026 R&D 100 Awards is 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 5, 2026, Eastern (New York City) time. Entries submitted by the final deadline carry a submission fee of $595. The R&D 100 Awards recognize new commercial products,…

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8 this week, and Artificial Analysis reports that it narrowly tops the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 61.4, compared with 60.2 for GPT-5.5 (xhigh). In Anthropic’s announcement for the model, Opus 4.8 looks mostly like an incremental upgrade over 4.7, but the company noted that its heavily-promoted Mythos model would…

A recent video from a popular software developer–based content creator pokes fun at the at times unreliable nature of AI coding agents. At the beginning of the clip, a screen shows a blue circle with the text “coding then.” She wants it green, opens the file, edits one line, and it turns green. Then later,…

During the 2018 to 2020 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the U.S. was the largest single-country donor to the response, investing over $516 million in various mitigation measures. Similarly, in the 2014 to 2015 outbreak in West Africa, the U.S. government allocated approximately $2.4 billion to the response.  So far,…

San Francisco-based OpenAI is launching Rosalind Biodefense, a program that sponsors vetted outside developers’ access to GPT-Rosalind, its gated life-sciences model, so they can build pandemic-preparedness and biosecurity tools. Alongside it, the company is opening GPT-Rosalind itself to select U.S. government and allied partners running public-health and biodefense missions. On background, OpenAI says it briefed…

On Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast in February, Elon Musk said that within 30 to 36 months space would be “by far the cheapest” place to run AI. Pressed on whether that was really true, he doubled down. “It’s not even close,” he said. Patel opened the podcast as a skeptic. Only 10 to 15% of a…

In the span of a couple of months this spring, Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Benchling and a handful of startups all shipped products using some version of “AI scientist” or “co-scientist” branding. They mean fundamentally different things. Google’s Co-Scientist is a coalition of six specialized AI agents that debate and rank hypotheses in an Elo-based tournament,…

2026 wasn’t looking like a strong year for vaccine dealmaking. Robert Kennedy Jr.’s HHS terminated $500 million in BARDA-backed mRNA contracts last August, then recommended shrinking the childhood vaccine schedule from 17 diseases to 11. A federal judge blocked those changes in March; the legal status of U.S. vaccine policy remains unresolved. Meanwhile, in February,…

A growing number of vendors, from Google DeepMind to Benchling to traditional ELN companies like Sapio Sciences, are pitching “co-scientist” functionality to bench researchers. They are part of a multibillion-dollar wave of AI life-sciences deals that has accelerated since late 2025. To cite but a few examples, OpenAI introduced GPT-Rosalind and named Amgen, Moderna, and…

Over the past few years, consulting firms and vendors have urged life science organizations to reinvent their operations with generative AI and, more recently, with semi-autonomous agents. A February 2026 Pharmaphorum analysis by NVIDIA’s David Ruau predicted that AI scientists would become “essential collaborators” embedded across the research lifecycle as 2026 progresses. The transition remains…

The modern pharmaceutical industry is navigating an era of rapid scientific progress, yet it remains constrained by a fundamentally inefficient development pipeline. Bringing a single new drug to market takes an average of 12 years and costs nearly $3 billion.1 Roughly 90% of drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail to achieve regulatory approval,2 often…

In the span of several weeks this spring, every major frontier AI lab and cloud hyperscaler formally declared pharma R&D a core vertical. In April, OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, its frontier reasoning model series built for life sciences research, biology, and drug discovery. The ChatGPT developer also announced a significant partnership with Novo Nordisk that same…

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has announced the commercial release of the Echo 650 Plus Series acoustic liquid handlers. The launch brings redesigned electronics, a new transducer architecture, and a 54% reduction in power consumption compared to legacy Echo instruments. According to Beckman Coulter, the core is a next-generation transducer equipped with a durable titanium lens.…