Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #52: Open AI's Accelerated Cell Reprogramming
Tempus-Paige Digital Pathology Acquisition Deal, Reasoning AIs for Biology & Antibiotics
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🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 AI accelerates cell reprogramming — OpenAI and Retro Biosciences used a biology-specialized GPT model to engineer new transcription factors that boosted stem cell marker expression over 50-fold and improved DNA repair.
🔹 Owkin unveils OwkinZero — introducing a 32B-parameter biological reasoning model trained on millions of Q&A pairs from patient data, reporting 78% accuracy on drug discovery tasks and outperforming leading LLMs like GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1. The company is also bringing agentic AI to cancer care, partnering with the Medical University of Vienna to integrate its AI copilot into oncology research and treatment, starting with advanced bladder cancer to support precision medicine and target discovery.
🔹 The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative unveiled rBio, an AI trained on virtual cell simulations to let scientists ask biological questions in plain language, aiming to speed research on gene interactions and disease mechanisms.
🔹 Generative AI designs new antibiotics — MIT and Broad Institute researchers created AI-designed molecules effective against MRSA and drug-resistant gonorrhea, with early lab tests confirming antibacterial activity and plans for preclinical development through nonprofit Phare Bio.
🔹 AI-enhanced antibody manufacturing for outbreak readiness — Asimov will apply its AI-driven CHO cell platform in a $8.5M BARDA-backed project to boost large-scale production of monoclonal antibodies targeting Ebola and Sudan viruses.
🔹 AI-designed Parkinson’s therapy moves toward trials — Insilico completed preclinical work on a brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitor and plans to file an IND in Q4 to evaluate its disease-modifying potential.Insilico also launches TargetBench 1.0, a public benchmark and platform for comparing drug target identification methods, aiming to standardize and improve confidence in AI-driven target discovery.
🔹 Quantum х AI х Drug Discovery — PolarisQB launched a beta version of its quantum-AI platform for small molecule design.
🔹 AI tool for prostate cancer risk gets FDA nod — ArteraAI received De Novo authorization for its multimodal AI software that analyzes biopsy images and clinical data to guide prostate cancer treatment decisions, marking the first FDA-cleared AI risk stratification tool in this area.
🔹 Advances in AI-guided cancer trials — Lantern Pharma reported a complete response in lymphoma, completed Phase 1a for its lead drug in solid tumors, and launched new AI tools for predicting drug combinations and brain penetration, doubling its oncology data engine to 200B points.
🔹 Silicon Valley firm adds AI to organoid culture — Molecular Devices introduced rocking incubation and AI scheduling to its automated cell culture system, aiming to reduce manual workload and support long-term brain organoid experiments in neurodegenerative research.
🔹 AI linked with automated labs — Ginkgo Bioworks, Inductive Bio, and Tangible Scientific launched a lab-in-the-loop workflow that connects AI drug design with automated testing and logistics to shorten development cycles in small-molecule discovery.
🔹 AI meets insurance for trial risk — Innovatrix partnered with Opyl to integrate predictive analytics into parametric insurance, offering financial protection against clinical trial failures using data from over 520,000 past studies.
🔹 Japan’s Kyorin Pharmaceutical will use Elix Discovery to accelerate early-stage drug design, applying generative models and predictive analytics to expand its pipeline.
🔹 Optic reports BIOPTIC agents outperform rivals — Optic showed its AI agents beat OpenAI DeepResearch and Perplexity on biopharma search tasks, with 83% recall in competitor mapping and structured data extraction.
🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
🔹 Schrödinger ends CDC7 program after trial deaths — halting its CDC7 inhibitor after two patient deaths in an AML trial, dropping its lead candidate while continuing early-stage work on other oncology targets.
🔹 AbbVie is acquiring Gilgamesh’s psychedelic depression therapy for up to $1.2B, after the drug showed a 94% remission rate in phase 2 trials. Gilgamesh will spin out its other R&D programs into a new company.
🔹 BioAge starts obesity trial — the aging-focused biotech began Phase 1 testing of an oral, brain-penetrant NLRP3 inhibitor after preclinical studies showed up to 25% weight loss when combined with GLP-1 therapy.
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
🔹 Lilly signs $1.3B AI drug discovery deal — Eli Lilly partnered with Superluminal to develop small-molecule drugs for obesity and metabolic diseases using its AI platform targeting GPCRs, with up to $1.3B in milestones, equity, and royalties.
🔹 $1B+ AI drug discovery deal — Halda Therapeutics partnered with VantAI to apply its AI and structural proteomics platform to identify target pairs for Halda’s novel cancer and immunology drugs, in a deal worth over $1B in upfront and milestone payments.
🔹 Tempus acquires Paige for $81M — Tempus bought AI pathology company Paige, gaining access to nearly 7M digitized slides and FDA-cleared tools, strengthening its oncology-focused foundation model and expanding its digital pathology portfolio.
🔹 Molecular You raises $5M — the preventive health company secured Series A funding to expand its biomarker-based predictive platform, which analyzes over 250 markers from a single blood test for early disease risk detection and personalized recommendations.
🔹 Doximity expands AI tools for doctors — Doximity acquired Pathway Medical for up to $63M to boost its clinical decision support capabilities.
🔹 Gameto raises $44M for IVF breakthrough — securing Series C funding to complete a U.S. Phase 3 trial of its stem cell-based egg maturation therapy.
🔹 Gene therapy developer Kriya raises $313M to advance single-dose treatments in ophthalmology, neurology, and metabolic diseases.
⚙️ Other Tech
(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)
🔹 Ultrasensitive cancer DNA test — Weill Cornell and Ultima Genomics introduced ppmSeq, a duplex sequencing method detecting variants as rare as 1 in 10 million for improved MRD and early cancer detection.
🔹 First tinnitus treatment in ND — The Alliance Center for Hearing in Bismarck became the first clinic in North Dakota certified to offer Lenire, an FDA-approved device using sound and tongue stimulation to retrain the brain’s response to tinnitus.
🔹 Immunai offers free sequencing to academics — the New York AI biotech launched a program giving labs free single-cell immune profiling for up to 1,000 human samples, aiming to support research in cancer, autoimmunity, and immunotherapy amid funding constraints.
🔹 Brain maps stay stable after amputation — a Nature Neuroscience study following patients up to 5 years post-surgery found that hand representations persist in the brain and are not overtaken by neighboring areas, challenging long-standing theories of cortical reorganization and guiding new directions for phantom limb pain therapies and neuroprosthetics.
🚀 A New Kid on the Block
(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)
🔹 Arnatar launches with $52M — San Diego–based Arnatar Therapeutics emerged from stealth with a dual-modality RNA platform (siRNA + ASO) and a lead program for Alagille syndrome, now in the clinic with FDA orphan and rare pediatric tags. The $52M series A was led by Eight Roads and 3E Bioventures.