Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #59: AI-Designed Cancer Drug Shows Early Responses
DeepMind & Yale release a 27B single-cell foundation model, an up to $1B protein design deal with Takeda, and Thermo Fisher adds OpenAI’s tools across its R&D stack
Hi! This is BiopharmaTrend’s weekly newsletter, Where Tech Meets Bio, where we explore technologies, breakthroughs, and cutting-edge companies.
If this newsletter is in your inbox, it’s because you subscribed, or someone thought you might enjoy it. In either case, you can subscribe directly by clicking this button:
🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 AI-designed HER2 drug shows early promise — Iambic reports early clinical responses from its AI-generated HER2 inhibitor in a Phase 1/1b trial, with activity in hard-to-treat cancers including brain metastases, advancing a compound developed from discovery to human dosing in under two years.
🔹 Google DeepMind and Yale release Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B, a large foundation model for single-cell analysis that Google says discovered and validated a novel immunotherapy-relevant effect of a CK2 inhibitor, boosting antigen presentation only in immune-responsive tumor environments.
🔹 Thermo Fisher will integrate OpenAI tools across its operations, including clinical research and drug development.
🔹 Owkin launches K Pro, an AI co-pilot for drug development that uses biological LLMs and multimodal data to speed decision-making, cutting target ID time by 70% and offering natural language queries for researchers and execs.
🔹 Benchling brings NVIDIA AI to the lab bench — integrating NVIDIA’s BioNeMo and OpenFold2 models via NIM microservices, and enabling scientists to run GPU-optimized protein prediction and biomolecular models directly within their existing R&D workflows.
🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
🔹 Takeda expands its partnership with Nabla Bio in a deal worth over $1B biobucks to co-develop AI-generated protein therapeutics, using Nabla’s JAM platform to accelerate de novo antibody design for hard-to-treat diseases.
🔹 AstraZeneca partners with Immunai in a deal worth up to $85M to develop inflammatory bowel disease therapies using Immunai’s AI-driven single-cell immune profiling platform.
🔹 First Alzheimer’s blood test cleared for primary care — Roche’s Elecsys pTau181 becomes the only FDA-cleared blood-based test to help rule out Alzheimer’s-related amyloid pathology in patients with cognitive decline, offering 97.9% negative predictive value.
🔹 insitro and Bristol Myers Squibb extend their ALS collaboration with up to $20M in new funding to develop small-molecule therapies using insitro’s machine learning platform.
This newsletter reaches over 9.9K industry professionals from leading organizations across the globe. To reserve your sponsor slot in one of the upcoming issues, contact us at info@biopharmatrend.com
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
🔹 Lila Sciences raises an additional $115M, including backing from Nvidia, bringing total funding to $350M for its AI-powered robotic labs aiming to automate scientific research across biotech, materials, and diagnostics.
🔹 AI and CNS drug discovery — Bexorg raises $42.5M to scale its AI platform trained on postmortem whole-human brains to improve CNS drug development by generating more predictive targets and biomarkers for conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
🔹 Town Hall Ventures raises $440M for AI-driven health equity — launching its Fund IV to back startups using AI and tech to improve healthcare access for underserved U.S. communities.
🔹 From manual to robotic compounding — After raising €6.7M this spring, Finnish healthtech firm CurifyLabs has launched upgraded software for its 3D printing-based compounding system to speed up and standardize personalized drug manufacturing in hospitals and pharmacies.
🔹 Targeting endometriosis at the tissue level — UK-based Cyclana Bio raises £5M in pre-seed funding to advance a whole tissue-based drug discovery platform for endometriosis, combining clinical samples and AI to identify extracellular matrix-driven therapeutic targets.
🔹 $20M to speed drug approvals — San Francisco-based Weave Bio secures $20M in Series A funding to expand its AI-native platform that automates regulatory workflows across the therapeutic lifecycle.
⚙️ Other Tech
(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)
🔹 Gene therapy for natural hearing — Regeneron reports new phase 1/2 data showing sustained hearing gains in most children treated with its AAV gene therapy for genetic deafness, with FDA filing expected later this year.
🔹 RNA-Seq for $50 — Plasmidsaurus launches an ultrafast RNA sequencing service priced at $50 per sample for academia, offering 3-day turnaround, no library prep, and built-in analytics, aiming to make transcriptomics as routine as plasmid sequencing.
🔹 Peptide-siRNA tech crosses into the brain — ProteinQure reports broad CNS distribution of its peptide-siRNA conjugates in non-human primates, outperforming lipid-based delivery in some cell types.
🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society
(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)
🔹 When helpfulness backfires — A new study in npj Digital Medicine finds that leading LLMs often generate false medical information when prompted with illogical requests, due to sycophantic behavior, but targeted prompting and fine-tuning can reduce this risk while preserving overall model performance.
🔹 Aging research reaches a turning point —
co‑founder , writing after this year’s ARDD 2025 meeting, highlights three transformative ideas in longevity science: GLP‑1 drugs emerging as scalable “healthspan” therapeutics, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis as a regulatory proxy for aging trials, and the gut microbiome as a central, treatable driver of biological aging.
Lipid Brain Atlas
A new preprint from Giovanni D’Angelo’s lab (EPFL), led by Luca Fusar Bassini, introduces the Lipid Brain Atlas—a high-resolution spatial map of membrane lipids across the adult mouse brain. The team used lipidomic profiling to chart biochemical territories without relying on anatomical priors.
They call these territories lipizones, regions defined purely by lipid composition. The authors report that lipid patterns alone can predict 3D coordinates in the mouse brain. Many lipizones line up with cell-type territories or with long-range connectivity, linking cell bodies to distant axon terminals. The map also shifts with physiological state—pregnancy coincides with coordinated changes across cortex and white matter.
The atlas is open-access and may provide a new reference for studying how metabolism and membrane biochemistry vary by brain region, cell type, and physiological state.
European Clinical Trial Map
Peter Arlett (European Medicines Agency) highlighted that more than 10,000 clinical trials have now been assessed through the EU Clinical Trials Regulation since its launch in early 2022.
As of now, nearly 4,000 trials are actively recruiting participants, and a public-facing Trial Map (launched in March 2025) lets users search by geography and indication.
The map, part of the ACT EU initiative, is meant to improve trial transparency and accessibility across regions.
In parallel, regulators recently set new 2030 targets aimed at expanding the number of multinational trials and accelerating recruitment timelines.