A.I./Robotics

When Becton, Dickinson and Company launched its Incada Connected Care Platform in October 2025 with the next-generation Pyxis Pro dispensing system, it framed the move as a way to turn data from nearly 3 million smart connected BD devices into actionable insights on medication inventory, waste and clinician workflows. Omar Ahmed, who joined BD as…

ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat backers including Debiopharm. In an…

2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. But 2026 arguably deserves that title. Adoption is climbing fast. One vendor tracking agent-building across 20,000 organizations found multi-agent systems grew 327% in under four months. Everyone from startups to big tech is shipping agents and agentic frameworks, including for science. Elsevier’s LeapSpace, which…

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says he doesn’t write prompts for Claude anymore. “My job is to write loops,” the head of Claude Code at Anthropic has said, describing a shift away from manual, turn-by-turn prompting toward building small systems that keep an agent working until a defined condition is met. Peter Steinberger,…

As Anthropic’s Fable 5 remains pulled from public access under a U.S. government export-control directive, OpenAI soft-launched GPT-5.6 Sol on June 26 to its own “trusted partners.” OpenAI boasted that 5.6 is its strongest model yet and led with a coding result, a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the benchmark that scores…

Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South…

When Eli Lilly and NVIDIA unveiled what they called the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer in October 2025, the story was mostly about scale. The Lilly-owned system, now branded LillyPod, brings more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a DGX SuperPOD designed to support drug discovery, manufacturing, medical imaging and enterprise AI agents. At January’s…

Since AlphaFold 2 cracked protein-structure prediction in 2020 and 2021, a growing ecosystem of biomolecular models has followed, including Boltz, Chai, OpenFold and Protenix. Yet commercial access remains uneven. AlphaFold 3, launched in 2024, broadened the field from protein folding to biomolecular interactions, while its public server remains off-limits for commercial use. DeepMind’s commercial engine…

NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks such as protein-structure prediction, molecular…

OpenAI and Molecule.one have announced a system that improved a reaction medicinal chemists rely on but have long struggled to run reliably. OpenAI billed the news as a “near-autonomous AI chemist.” The setup paired one of OpenAI’s frontier models, GPT-5.4, with Maria, Molecule.one’s agentic chemistry AI, and an automated high-throughput lab. The chemistry target was…

Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for…

Over the past year, the AI-eats-software camp, which includes sell-side strategists at Jefferies and, more cautiously, analysts at Bain, has warned that generative AI could eat into the seat-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In some respects, those fears have been justified. After Anthropic released plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent earlier in 2026,…

In January 2024, Medable, the decentralized clinical-trial company headquartered in Palo Alto, used AI to translate a study protocol directly into a configured eCOA mobile app, complete with questionnaires, workflows and translation into roughly 25 languages. The company said then the feature could halve eCOA deployment timelines, which had typically run 12 to 16 weeks.…

A blog post from the AI image company announced the launch of a whole-body ultrasound scanner users would step into through a pool of water. “We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” the company noted. The “Ultrasonic CT” will be featured in…

Days after going public, SpaceX has reached a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion, even with its stock skidding in midday trading on June 17. At the time of writing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was worth more than the next four billionaires on Earth combined. SpaceX laid out its vision weeks ago in its S-1,…

Over the past two years, software engineering has handed a growing share of its routine work to AI agents. At one end of the spectrum, companies ranging from Google to Anthropic use AI to write the bulk of their code. At the other, there are reports of the bills coming due for heavy users at…

In April 2026, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, now a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, posted an architectural overview on GitHub. The project itself, which he called an “LLM wiki,” has generated significant buzz, though nothing approaching OpenClaw, the agent framework that became one of the most successful projects in GitHub history. The tweet that…

Digital pathology matured quickly during the pandemic, when remote work needs and temporary FDA enforcement discretion lowered the perceived barriers to whole-slide imaging. Capital followed. Roche’s May agreement to acquire PathAI for up to $1.05 billion, pending closing, is only the most recent sign of how much money is chasing the field. The most valuable…

At Microsoft Build 2026, the software giant’s annual developer conference, held June 2 and 3 in San Francisco, the life sciences AI company Causaly announced a collaboration with Microsoft aimed at one of drug discovery’s earliest and most consequential decisions: which biological targets are worth pursuing. Causaly runs an agentic AI platform that reads across…

Claude Mythos was one of the most hyped models in recent memory. And it is out now. Sort of. Yesterday Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a generally available model built on the same weights as Mythos 5 that switches over to the older Opus 4.8 for most tasks that even mention cybersecurity or biology. Early…

For eight days, a kilometer of fiber-optic cable on the floor of Monterey Bay became a temporary nervous system for one of the West Coast’s major submarine canyons. The portable seafloor sensing system, deployed at roughly 380 meters depth in Monterey Bay, operated autonomously for eight days and detected all 32 earthquakes in the U.S.…

Since April 2026, AI labs have begun keeping their most powerful models behind vetted-access programs. Anthropic limited its Claude Mythos system and OpenAI its GPT-5.5-Cyber to approved security partners, each billed as able to spot and exploit software flaws with unprecedented precision. Also in April, OpenAI announced its GPT-Rosalind life-sciences model, gating it over biosecurity…

President Donald J. Trump is pushing Washington deeper into the business of artificial intelligence, with a pair of new directives that move the federal government closer to the release calendar of frontier models, the military deployment of commercial AI and possibly the ownership structure of the companies building it. The President signed two artificial intelligence…

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…