Life Science

Not long ago, a running joke took hold among software engineers and aspiring “vibe coders.” The bit was to hand an AI model a monumentally complex, multi-month task, building a full Slack clone from scratch, recreating a game like GTA, or even designing and training its own successor on a laptop, and demand it do…

A soft contact lens can now measure serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation and stress, in tears. Researchers at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) in Los Angeles described the reusable lens Sept. 16 in Science Translational Medicine. Such lenses could detect chronic stress, which raises the risk of conditions from heart disease…

Since early 2023, large language models (LLMs) have posted passing-level scores on medical licensing exam questions. A study published that February found that the first iteration of ChatGPT, based on the GPT-3.5 model that debuted in 2022, scored at or near the passing threshold on publicly available questions from all three steps of the United…

Machines are now solving open math problems and rebuilding complex software on their own. What they do next to the rest of science is an open question. Some of the clearest gains have come in tasks where answers can be checked automatically, using a proof checker or a test suite. Still, frontier AI is moving…

German biophysicists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel and Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in optogenetics, a technique to control neurons with light, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced today. Thomas Perlmann, the Nobel Assembly’s secretary-general, pointed to vision restoration as an…

Hansa Biopharma, the Swedish company behind the immunoglobulin G (IgG)-cleaving enzyme imlifidase, will use the AI protein-engineering platform from Dutch-Swiss firm Cradle to design its next generation of autoimmune drug candidates, the companies announced Oct. 1. Hansa’s scientists will combine Cradle’s tools with Hansa’s existing experimental data, disease knowledge and protein-engineering expertise. “We’re not building…

A little over a decade ago, Merck & Co. outspent Google on research and development. Merck still led in 2013, with $7.5 billion against Google’s $7.1 billion. Google pulled ahead in 2014, spending $9.8 billion against the $7.2 billion Merck reported in its 2014 annual report.1 Big Tech’s R&D spending has only continued to climb.…

Asisloglycoprotein receptors (ASGPRs) on healthy hepatocyte membranes physiologically function in clearing glycoproteins containing galactose or N-acetylglucosamine residues from the circulation. In mammalian circulation, approximately 90% of proteins are glycoproteins, typically adorned with terminal sialic acid residues. Physiologically, as these glycoproteins age, sialic acids are removed, exposing galactose, lactose, or N-acetylgalactosamine residues. These exposed sugars are…

Verily Health, a company focusing on AI for precision health that emerged from Google X and eventually became Google Life Sciences in 2015, has received funding from its partner Nvidia. The company’s flagship product, the Verily Pre Platform, is a precision health platform that turns clinical, genomic and device data into AI-ready datasets. Verily’s current investors include Alphabet, Series X Capital and UCHealth. In…

Costa Rica, the land of pura vida, stunning national parks and biodiversity, has transformed itself from an agricultural-focused exporter into a high-tech manufacturing hub. “Medical devices are now our biggest export,” said Keiner Morales, chief technology officer at Lantern Med Digital. The country has transformed considerably since the 1980s. “Back then, we were a coffee-and-banana…

Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,…

Even on the largest supercomputers, simulations that explicitly resolve every blood cell can only cover a small volume. On Summit, Oak Ridge National Labs’ supercomputer, cell-resolved simulations topped out at roughly a three-millimeter cube. Exascale machines like Aurora and Frontier have pushed that to about a one-centimeter cube with several billion cells, up from around 500 million, said Amanda Randles of Duke…

Whatever your take on the current AI wave, it is clear that the prospect of creating software has been transformed. “The most impressive edge of it is probably using [genAI models] to help speed code development. And that’s kind of working,” said the computer scientist Jaron Lanier recently. Frontier AI labs are now pushing for…

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…