Life Science

2025 put life sciences labs through the wringer. Venture funding tightened. Layoff emails piled up from Boston to South San Francisco. Clinical timelines slipped, capital projects were paused and plenty of once white-hot markets started to feel a little oversupplied. For lab managers and R&D leaders, the year perhaps felt less like a “soft landing”…

Prelude Therapeutics, a clinical-stage precision oncology company, has released preclinical results indicating that its JAK2V617F mutant-selective inhibitors have disease-modifying potential for myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). MPNs are diseases of the bone marrow and blood affecting approximately 200,000 Americans. The disease can progress into acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In most cases, MPN has no cure. Current treatments…

When Washington turns research budgets into a political battleground, it sends what one Swiss ecosystem leader calls a “fatal signal” to scientists watching from around the world. Increasingly, that signal is redirecting their attention toward Switzerland, and especially toward the Basel region. “We are hearing more and more from US scientists and companies that they…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened its East Coast Advanced Therapies Collaboration Center, or ATxCC, in Philadelphia, a move that places the life sciences supplier directly inside the operations of early-stage cell and gene therapy developers. The center sits inside BioLabs for Advanced Therapeutics, a newly expanded 53,000-square-foot incubator in the city’s fast-growing “Cellicon Valley” cluster.…

AUTOMA+ 2025 will gather pharmaceutical and biotechnology professionals from around the world Nov. 24–25 in Vösendorf, Austria, to exchange insights on automation and digitalization in pharmaceutical operations. While the congress emphasizes European participation, attendees from other regions will broaden the exchange of ideas. European participants include several Spanish pharmaceutical organizations. RidNova Pharmaceuticals, a contract development…

2025 has not exactly been a good year for life science labs. While the pandemic gave rise to something of a lab sugar rush, lab funding was already down at the start of 2025 and the downward trend has mostly accelerated since then. A wave of speculative deliveries met softer demand, pushing national vacancy higher…

Every lab has a Friday-night freezer story. The alarm chirps, people scramble, and someone winds up babysitting samples with a clipboard that was never meant to be a forensic record. As instruments fill the lab and teams shift from wielding pipettes to orchestrating cloud workflows and collaborating with AI agents, the margin for ad hoc…

Almost a year after Nature called spatial proteomics the “Method of the Year,” the market is expected to reach $99.1 million in 2025, up from $87.5 million in 2024. Interestingly, the rise of spatial proteomics and spatial biology led to legal disputes between some of the top companies: 10x Genomics, NanoString and Bruker.  The legal…

The adult human heart has limited ability to repair itself after damage from events such as a heart attack. Instead, the damaged muscle is replaced by non-beating scar tissue, which can weaken the heart and lead to heart failure. A new study could change that. A study from Mount Sinai found that a naturally occurring…

Verily, a Dallas-based Alphabet subsidiary that Alphabet is preparing to spin off or sell, announced Tuesday it is integrating NVIDIA’s AI software stack into Pre platform, its platform for analyzing health data. Specifically, NVIDIA NeMo, Parabricks and CUDA-X Data Science are now available as pre-configured applications within Verily Workbench, the company’s trusted research environment (TRE),…

A familiar expectation in technology goes like this: breakthrough innovation sparks euphoric predictions, investors pile in, reality disappoints, valuations crash and only then does the technology mature quietly into actual utility. This is the Gartner Hype Cycle, a framework created in 1995 that became an industry institution after one analyst used it to correctly predict…

The OpenFold Consortium released a preview of OpenFold3, an Apache 2.0-licensed foundation model that predicts 3D protein structures and co-folded complexes with small-molecule ligands, nucleic acids and other proteins, positioning it for industry use at scale. Simultaneously, Apheris, a Berlin-based provider of enterprise-grade AI applications for drug discovery, launched ApherisFold to run, benchmark, and fine-tune…

Eli Lilly said today it is building what it calls the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful AI supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. The system, billed as the first Nvidia DGX SuperPOD configured with DGX B300 systems, will power an “AI factory” for drug discovery and development. Lilly and Nvidia say the installation will use 1,016 Nvidia…

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and NVIDIA are expanding their collaboration to accelerate development of AI-powered virtual cell models, committing to GPU-accelerated processing of petabyte-scale biology datasets and adding open imaging and RNA models plus shared benchmarks to CZI’s Virtual Cells Platform. The effort advances multiple strategies to relieve persistent bottlenecks in biological research: scale and…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is rumored to be staffing up Merge Labs, an unannounced brain-computer interface venture that points away from skull-opening implants and toward ultrasound-based sensing. Reporting from The Verge says Altman tapped Caltech engineer Mikhail Shapiro, known for ultrasound neurotech and gene-encoded “acoustic reporter” cells, suggesting a non-implanted, “read-only” path to decode intent…

At its “Research to Reality” media event on Thursday, Google showcased DeepSomatic, an AI tool that accurately identifies cancer-causing genetic mutations, outperforming current methods according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology on October 16.”DeepSomatic is an AI tool that helps scientists find genetic variants in cancer cells that could enable personalized treatment,” said Yossi…

Thermo Fisher Scientific beat Wall Street expectations in the third quarter of 2025, reporting $11.12 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings of $5.79 per share. The results signal resilience for lab infrastructure demand even as U.S. research budgets face headwinds and the U.S. government shutdown is in its 22nd day. The Waltham, Mass.–based company’s Laboratory…

Anthropic today announced Claude for Life Sciences, an AI platform that reportedly exceeds human performance on laboratory protocol comprehension. A press release notes that it scores 0.83 versus a 0.79 human baseline on the Protocol QA benchmark. In addition, the platform integrates directly with scientific tools like Benchling and 10x Genomics. The announcement noted that…

Healthcare data is often incomplete and inconsistent, limiting efforts to improve patient outcomes and operational efficiency. A 2021 report from Sage Growth found that only 20% of healthcare organizations fully trust their data. Because records follow patients across providers with shifting identifiers and coding schemes, the same encounter often appears multiple times or partially, breaking…

Google Cloud and multiple healthcare partners announced production deployments of AI agents on Oct. 16, timed to the release of Google Cloud’s second annual ROI of AI in healthcare & life sciences report and the start of HLTH 2025, held October 19–22 in Las Vegas. The announcements include clinical-note summarization at scale at Hackensack Meridian…

Thermo Fisher is entering a collaboration with OpenAI to “help to improve the speed and success of drug development,” the company announced today. Thermo Fisher is embedding OpenAI Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) into product development, service delivery, customer engagement and operational efficiency, the company said.  Thermo Fisher said the collaboration will shorten the cycle time…

Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for immune system research that has contributed to medical advances in cancer and autoimmune treatments.  The researchers identified a class of cells called regulatory T cells and the genes that control them. Their work revealed how…

Obesity is a risk factor for many diseases, from diabetes to heart disease to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While researchers have long suspected a link between insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s, giving rise to the research term type 3 diabetes (not a clinical diagnosis), the epidemiologic signal appears to be strongest for midlife obesity and insulin resistance.…

Researchers from Oregon Health & Science University produced human egg cells from skin cells, they reported in Nature Communications. Once fertilized, the eggs were able to form early embryos. The researchers removed the nucleus from a human egg cell and replaced it with the nucleus of a type of skin cell called a fibroblast, a…

In 1982, Joy Milne detected her husband’s Parkinson’s disease with her heightened sense of smell. She wouldn’t realize the source of the scent until after her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s over a decade later. The couple attended a support group, and Milne smelled the disease on almost every person there.  The Milnes’ case was…