Life Science

Longevity medicine is gradually going mainstream in pharma. In April, Insilco Medicine unveiled what it termed the industry’s first longevity board, a panel aimed at accelerating AI-driven aging research into new therapies. Chairing the board is Eli Lilly molecular discovery executive Andrew Adams, alongside Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Medici Therapeutics CEO Denitsa Milanova, and Insilico…

FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics opened a new headquarters and iPSC manufacturing facility in Madison on May 19, expanding the company’s capacity to produce human cells for drug discovery, toxicity testing, stem cell banking and cell therapy development. The 175,000-square-foot campus, part of a $200 million strategic investment announced in 2023, includes process development laboratories and a…

Stanford researchers have announced that they have compressed a time-intensive protein building and testing process to 24 hours. Published in Molecular Systems Biology, the paper describes a method known as MIDAS (Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening) that differs from traditional protein engineering, which requires cloning genes into circular plasmids, growing them in bacteria or yeast,…

Companies from Palantir to Salesforce to Veeva are racing to speed up regulatory workflows with AI agents, as is a wave of startups targeting everything from clinical document generation to pharmacovigilance case processing. Meanwhile, many large pharmas are pursuing a build-and-compose strategy of their own, stitching AI into existing regulatory systems, validated workflows and company-specific…

Say you are in the market for form-fitted clothing for a special event. Off the rack won’t do, and your tailoring requests are demanding: structural alterations, unusual fabrics, tight deadline. Some tailors might balk at the request. Others might take your measurements, feed them into the system and tell you the job can’t be done.…

Several of the highest-profile AI-biology startups have made openness part of their strategy. Profluent, an Emeryville-based protein design company, open-sourced OpenCRISPR-1, which it calls the first AI-created gene editor to successfully modify human DNA, and says tens of thousands of researchers have accessed it since 2024. Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by Nobel laureate David Baker with…

PacBio’s HiFi Solves Sub-fertility Consortium published a preprint of its first major study. The study focused on couples with unexplained subfertility or recurrent pregnancy loss after standard clinical evaluation had ruled out known causes. Subfertility affects approximately one in six couples globally. Genetic evaluation often remains fragmented, requiring multiple sequential tests over months to years…

An outbreak of Andes virus (ANDV), a strain of hantavirus, on a cruise ship has made a diagnostic test more urgent than ever. The incubation period for ANDV ranges from four to 42 days, with symptoms becoming life-threatening in 24 to 48 hours, making early detection essential. ANDV is also the only known strain of…

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed AI drug design company led by Sir Demis Hassabis, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Jumper for their work on the protein structure prediction platform AlphaFold, announced a $2.1 billion Series B on May 12. The total outside capital raised to date is about $2.6 billion. Thrive Capital…

A recent outbreak of the Andes (ANDV) strain of the hantavirus aboard a cruise ship has increased public interest in efforts towards a vaccine. However, a publicly available vaccine is likely still several years away. ANDV causes Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS), which has a 30% to 50% fatality rate. Some research also indicated that the…

A paper published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology identified 23 fungal strains isolated from NASA spacecraft assembly cleanrooms capable of surviving ultraviolet radiation exposure.  Using experimental simulation facilities, the researchers conducted a comprehensive assessment of microbial survivability and morphology on the most resilient spacecraft-associated microorganisms.  Simulating Mars and sterilization protocols The researchers used a Mars…

In 2025, the Trump administration canceled funding for a pilot project studying the hantavirus, which has been confirmed to be behind an ongoing outbreak on the MV Hondius cruise ship.  The project aimed to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to humans. It was being conducted through the West African Center for Emerging Infectious…

DeepMind was among the first organizations built from the ground up around artificial intelligence. Founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014, the London-based lab, now known as Google DeepMind, helped catalyze the current AI wave, and two of its researchers, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for…

Researchers have developed molecular quantum nanosensors (MoQNs) designed to operate in the cytoplasm and nuclei of living cancer cells to map radical-generation processes and thermal dynamics that are linked to cancer-associated cellular physiology.  The sensors use molecular-level uniformity to achieve a threefold enhancement in spectral resolution and superior thermometric specificity. The platform enables absolute temperature…

Scientists from the Robotic Materials Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany published a paper in Science Advances last week describing biohybrid microrobots that can deliver cancer treatments directly to tumor sites.  Medical microrobots have potential for targeted therapeutic delivery. However, current systems achieve only physical targeting, and once at the…

Traditionally, discussions about experimental reproducibility have focused on statistics, sample sizes and publication bias. However, procedural quality and training also play an important role in reducing variability.  JoVE, a video platform for scientific content, is aiming to improve the reproducibility of research by providing detailed visual demonstrations of experimental procedures. This is important in research…

BEIT Inc., a quantum computing startup founded by ex-Googlers in Kraków, has launched CovAngelo, a hybrid quantum-classical platform designed to accurately model chemical reactions in complex molecular environments. Its focus is on covalent inhibitors. The firm is backed by Bloomberg Beta and the European Innovation Council and participates in NVIDIA Inception, a startup program that…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has opened a flagship U.S. Bioprocess Design Center (BDC) at its Plainville, Massachusetts, site, adding 4,000 square feet of lab and training space for biologics process development. The center gives biotech and pharma customers hands-on access to Thermo Fisher’s integrated bioproduction workflow, ranging from media to cell line development to chromatography and …

A pharmaceutical company can spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars learning that a Phase 3 trial was aimed at the wrong patients, the wrong endpoint or the wrong competitive bar. The venture-backed startup QuantHealth is trying to force that reckoning earlier. QuantHealth says its AI clinical simulation platform can test trial designs before…

Somewhere in the world right now, a patient sits in a clinic waiting room ahead of a clinical trial visit. On the clipboard is eligibility status, recent labs, comorbidities, medication history, prior notes, all of it needing clinician review before anything else happens. This is the smallest waiting room in the whole system. Zoom out,…

The new Thermo Scientific FluidEase Pro ClipTip electronic pipettes combine a large, high-resolution touchscreen with ClipTip attachment, electronic tip ejection, Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, up to five user profiles and a modular charging stand that can support as many as four pipettes. “Lab users today grew up with smartphones,” said Joyce Ji, Director & General Manager,…

Imagine a patient arrives in the ER after a fall. A CT scan already shows blood collecting in the subdural space, but the case still has to move through the usual chain: radiology review, report generation, chart review, specialist notification and treatment triage. Each handoff adds time. The AI care-coordination platform Viz.ai is betting that…

Suppose the only way to search for life other planets was to vaporize them first, then sift through the debris. “Imagine if you had to literally nuke planets to figure out whether there’s alien life there,” said Parmita Mishra, founder and CEO of Precigenetics, a San Carlos, California-based real-time cellular imaging startup. “We would never…

Drugmaker Merck & Co. is committing up to $1 billion over the next decade-plus to make Google Cloud its primary AI anchor, the companies announced Wednesday at Google’s Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. The deal covers AI infrastructure, engineers, and licensing of Google’s Gemini Enterprise platform, with Google Cloud staff embedded alongside Merck teams.…

Insilico Medicine on Tuesday announced the formation of what it calls the industry’s first Longevity Board. The firm is naming Eli Lilly Group Vice President of Molecular Discovery Andrew Adams as chairman as the company pushes deeper into AI-driven aging research. The board will oversee work spanning aging biomarkers, dual-purpose targets implicated in aging and…