Life Science

Clinical trials are notoriously difficult to predict, and they have grown more so as protocols pile on endpoints, procedures and eligibility rules. As that complexity climbs, so do the odds of studies needing mid-course changes. The share of Phase 1 through 4 protocols requiring at least one amendment hit 76%, up from 57% in 2015,…

One year after nearly 500 National Institutes of Health (NIH) employees signed a letter warning that political interference was threatening the agency’s mission, the authors of a new report say the situation has only gotten worse.  “The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” the Bethesda Declaration: One Year…

Within roughly 18 months, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Anthropic have all launched or upgraded products aimed at scientific research, many of them built around AI agents that promise to compress the earliest, most expensive stages of discovery. That push builds on the explosive growth of AI coding tools. Even as many frontier…

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…

A comprehensive analysis of the expected shelf-lives of the entire 2023 ISS formulary found that 54 of 91 medications have a terrestrial shelf-life of 36 months or less, which could be accelerated by space radiation. As NASA aims for Mars missions, which take about 200 days, resupply becomes unrealistic. Now, researchers at the University of…

Countable Labs, a Palo Alto company built around direct single-molecule counting, has raised $26 million in an oversubscribed round to push its Countable PCR platform toward the clinic and global commercialization. Countable Labs’ twist on standard PCR doesn’t rely on microfluidics, physically isolating single DNA or RNA targets into over 30 million picoliter-sized compartments within…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Researchers at Washington University have genetically engineered hookworms to produce and secrete a human antibody, creating a “living pharmaceutical biofactory,” according to the study published in Nature Communications.  To survive within the human gut, hookworms secrete over 800 molecules to modulate inflammation and maintain homeostasis.  “We thought: what if we make it secrete one more…

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…

A team of researchers recently uncovered living microorganisms on the remains of the 5,300-year-old Iceman, revealing a methodological gap in modern genomics. In a study published in Microbiome, the team showed that while DNA analysis can map the presence of ancient genetic material, traditional petri dish cultivation remains necessary to determine if those microorganisms are…

Stanford scientists have discovered a new kind of cell death in flatworm immune cells. Called ruptosis, the mechanism results in the cell exploding and taking out approximately 70 cells surrounding it.  The flatworms, Schmidtea mediterranea, evolved to sacrifice healthy cells through this process in order to ensure the elimination of biological threats. Unlike vertebrate immune…

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…

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…

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,…

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…