Software

AI is being commoditized in front of our eyes. Months after a frontier release, rivals, often including open source variants, either match it in terms of benchmarks, or come close. Meanwhile, every R&D and IP team now has access to the same enterprise Copilot license, the same Claude and ChatGPT seats, the same general-purpose models…

As companies look for ways to let AI systems and outside partners analyze sensitive data without exposing entire files, NTT Research is launching Scale Academy, an internal incubator whose first product is SaltGrain, a zero-trust data security suite built on attribute-based encryption. The launch of SaltGrain comes on the heels of the November debut of…

LabWare is at Pittcon 2026 teased the next phase of its SaaS strategy, a year after launching LabWare ASSURE in April 2025 as its food safety and quality LIMS offering. The company’s message in San Antonio: enterprise-grade LIMS doesn’t have to mean 18-month implementations. ASSURE is a fully hosted, pre-configured SaaS LIMS targeting food safety,…

“Will self-driving ‘robot labs’ replace biologists?” That was the headline Nature ran on February 18, reporting on a preprint from Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI that used GPT-5 to help design and execute more than 36,000 cell-free protein synthesis experiments. The authors report that the experiment beat the prior state of the art by 40%, but…

Olivera Kotevska, a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, won an R&D 100 Award for PRESTO, a privacy-preserving AI toolkit she led at ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division. “Being one of the winners is really an honor,” Kotevska said at the 2025 R&D 100 Awards gala. “I still sometimes cannot believe this is…

Researchers from the Nanoscience Center at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, have developed a computational model that could expedite the use of nanomaterials in biomedical applications. Their machine learning framework is capable of predicting how proteins interact with ligand-stabilized gold nanoclusters, materials widely used in bioimaging, biosensing and targeted drug delivery. Gold nanoclusters are used…

While the dawn of ChatGPT in 2022 helped kickstart the current AI wave, an AI moment that arguably mattered more for science was AlphaFold. December 2018, first place at CASP13, the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction competition. By 2020, protein structure prediction was close enough to “solved” that the real question shifted from whether a…

Revvity, a science technology company, announced the introduction of a new Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) called Signals Xynthetica on Tuesday, adding to a growing trend that is democratizing predictive modeling. Instead of building models, which is expensive and requires specialized skills, companies are now subscribing to pre-trained, high-fidelity models. This allows labs that couldn’t afford to build…

Renesas Electronics has begun sampling its R-Car X5H Gen 5 automotive system-on-chip and is now offering evaluation boards along with the R-Car Open Access (RoX) Whitebox Software Development Kit as it advances its software-defined vehicle platform toward broader adoption. The company positions the R-Car X5H as a central compute device designed to run multiple vehicle…

The quality management software firm QT9 Software has outlined features of its QT9 ERP platform, an enterprise resource planning system designed for firms in regulated life sciences sectors, including medical devices, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. QT9 ERP is a pre-validated system that includes support for FDA 21 CFR Part 11 electronic records and approvals. According to…

Seven out of ten researchers say their work would be impossible without software. More than half write their own code. And among those who do, one in five has had no formal training in software development, according to the UK-based Software Sustainability Institute. This is the gap where silent failures live. “There’s often a great…

[Image from Adobe Stock] Why you should read this report: Lab automation looks hot, but the usual indicators are quiet: patents are flat, vendors report uneven demand, and standard market metrics barely move. This report shows what those signals miss—where recent AI-drug-discovery capital actually landed, why “Lab Automation Engineer” roles increasingly require Python and APIs…

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…

Upon launch, Anthropic hailed Claude Sonnet 4.5 as the best coding model in the world. The model launched on September 29 with a lead on real-repo coding (SWE-bench Verified) and a big jump in “computer use” (OSWorld). Anthropic reports 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified and 61.4% on OSWorld; in press briefings they also cited 82% on…

Thermo Fisher Scientific released Chromeleon 7.4, a unified chromatography and mass spectrometry data system that supports single-quad, triple-quad, and HRAM instruments and adds centralized storage, remote access, audit trails, and e-signatures for GxP/21 CFR Part 11 compliance in biopharma, food safety, and environmental labs, according to a press release. Chromeleon 7.4 is built for networked…

EpiEarth predicts the number of disease cases, disease risk and the impact of mitigations on potential epidemics. The software can predict on a day, season or decadal timescale, giving officials the necessary time to plan. The modular design enables the substitution of different models, diseases or vector species, making EpiEarth generalizable across vector-borne diseases that…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named on 20 of the 2025 R&D 100 Awards, 17 as lead developer and three as co-developer.  The showing sets a new record for the lab, accounting for about one-fifth of all winners. Since the 1980s, ORNL has won more than 260 R&D 100 Awards Our sister publication engineering.com recently…

griDNA, an R&D 100 (2025) finalist from Sandia National Laboratories, is an autoencoder-based system that fuses 60-samples-per-second grid measurements (frequency, voltage, current) with intermittent network telemetry to identify cyber, physical, and blended anomalies on the power grid. The team has run the model on low-cost single-board computers and on existing security devices and is field-testing…

LexisNexis unveiled Protégé, a natural language AI assistant that translates questions like “What are the top M&A targets in biotech?” into patent analytics insights. The firm positions the new offering as eliminating the need for users to master complex database syntax in the company’s PatentSight+ platform. The assistant parses a user’s prompt, maps it to…

Apple hasn’t announced dates, but multiple outlets that track Cupertino’s annual cadence point to an iPhone 17 family reveal in the second week of September, with pre-orders that Friday and retail availability the Friday after. Based on Apple’s pattern and current reporting, the most plausible schedule is a keynote on Tuesday, September 9, 2025, pre-orders…

A total of 158 Finalists for the 2025 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. Now in its 63rd year, this renowned global science and innovation competition drew entries from 13 countries/regions. This year’s esteemed judging panel featured 54 respected industry professionals from across the globe. The Finalists are listed below by category,…

Patsnap, a Singapore-based AI platform for patent and R&D intelligence, hit unicorn status in 2021 with a valuation over $1 billion after a $300 million Series E round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent. High-profile clients include NASA, Tesla, Vodafone, MIT and General Electric. The company was founded in 2007. After the CEO…

The unicorn biotechnology startup Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by 2024 Nobel Prize winner David Baker, has released what it claims is the largest public genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset to date. Freely available, the data is available as a 520 GB download and comes with an associated pre-print. Comprising eight million cells, the X-Atlas/Orion dataset dwarfs previous public…

Drugmakers aren’t the only ones upgrading their data plumbing. While Moderna works with Benchling to build out an R&D data platform, NASA has trained a 3 billion parameter model on 100 million Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images to pull new signals from 25 years of Earth-observation data. Introducing SatVision-TOA The resulting model, known…

More R&D-heavy organizations in sectors like biopharma are revamping their data plumbing. One such entity is Moderna, which is expanding its collaboration with Benchling to consolidate fragmented laboratory data into a unified, AI-primed platform. This move addresses an  industry gap, as a 2024 Benchling report found that only 14% of large biopharma and a 3%…