Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #62: Virtual Biology, Open Co-Folding, and a World-Model Lab Agent
Lilly expands AI drug discovery via Insilico & XtalPi deals, Neuralink's Rival raises $200M, AI healthcare funding at $10.7B in 2025
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🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 Kosmos, an AI Scientist, claims 6 months of work in a day — a new agent from FutureHouse spun into Edison Scientific, capable of reading 1,500 papers and writing 42,000 lines of code per run, with 79% reproducibility and seven validated discoveries across neuroscience, materials science, and genetics—enabled by a persistent world model for long-horizon reasoning.
🔹 Atomic-level AI antibody design — David Baker’s lab and Xaira Therapeutics report in Nature AI-generated antibodies built from scratch with atomic precision, using RFdiffusion to target specific epitopes and confirm structures via cryo-EM, marking a step toward rational, modular design in protein therapeutics.
🔹 With OpenFold3, BoltzGen, and Pearl coming out, Woody Sherman (Psivant Therapeutics) highlights three standout takes: Jan Domanski’s State of Co-Folding 2025 on the shift from benchmarks to real-world impact; David Pearlman’s The Great Divergence on OpenFold3 as a foundational, open platform for bio-AI; and Ray Dogum’s OpenFold Released on how open access could accelerate industrial adoption of high-accuracy protein complex modeling.
🔹 CZI Biohub debuts two AI models for virtual biology — VariantFormer, a genomic foundation model trained on 2,300 genomes for cross-tissue expression and disease variant prediction, and scLDM, a diffusion model for high-fidelity single-cell transcript generation to enable virtual experiments across immune and perturbed cell states.
🔹 Rethinking AI in medicine — shared by Jan Beger (GE HealthCare), a new paper in npj Digital Medicine argues that AI tools should augment clinical reasoning rather than focus solely on predictive accuracy, emphasizing bias reduction, interpretability, and integration into real-world team workflows.
🔹 Could black box AI be more trustworthy than explainable models in medicine? — a new Journal of Clinical Epidemiology paper argues that current explainability tools like SHAP can mislead clinicians, suggesting that rigorous validation and outcome performance (not interpretability) should guide trust in AI for healthcare.
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🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
Fresh off announcing an AI supercomputer partnership with NVIDIA, Eli Lilly is expanding its AI push with two new deals:
$100M drug discovery deal with Insilico Medicine — in a newly formalized collaboration, Lilly and Insilico will jointly apply the Insilico’s AI platform to generate and optimize compounds across selected targets. Earlier, Insilico disclosed eight oral small-molecule programs targeting cardiometabolic diseases as part of a broader push into longevity-linked therapies.
$345M AI-driven antibody deal with XtalPi’s Ailux — Lilly will use Ailux’s bispecific antibody platform (combining structural modeling, generative design, and developability analytics) for multi-target biologic development, with options to license the tech.
🔹 Also, Eli Lilly partners on RNAi for metabolic diseases — a global collaboration with SanegeneBio to develop RNAi therapies using SanegeneBio’s tissue-selective delivery platform, with the deal worth up to $1.2B in milestones plus royalties.
🔹 Bristol Myers and insitro extend ALS collaboration — BMS will pay up to $20M to extend its AI-driven drug discovery partnership with insitro by one year, aiming to advance a small molecule against a novel ALS target.
🔹 Pfizer to acquire obesity drug developer for $10B — Pfizer outbid Novo Nordisk to acquire Metsera for up to $10B, including milestone payments, after FTC concerns derailed Novo’s rival offer.
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
🔹 AI healthcare startups see funding surge in 2025 — venture investment in AI-driven health tech has hit $10.7B YTD, up 24% from 2024, with major rounds from Isomorphic Labs ($600M), Lila Sciences ($550M), Abridge ($550M), and OpenEvidence ($610M); Crunchbase data shows startups capturing the bulk of AI spend as adoption accelerates across clinical documentation, RCM, and drug discovery.
🔹 Iambic raises $100M+ to advance AI-discovered drugs — San Diego-based company closed an oversubscribed round following clinical data on its lead HER2-targeted program and a new collaboration with Jazz Pharmaceuticals.
🔹 QIAGEN acquires Parse Biosciences for $225M to scale AI-ready single-cell solutions — Parse, behind the GigaLab platform and datasets like the 100M-cell Tahoe-100M atlas with Tahoe Therapeutics and NVIDIA, is also powering large-scale human lung tissue perturbation atlas with Helmholtz Munich; the deal expands QIAGEN’s sample tech into high-throughput single-cell analysis for AI-driven drug discovery.
🔹 Colossal Biosciences acquires Viagen to expand de-extinction capabilities — known for creating dire wolf-like canids, red wolf clones, and mammoth-inspired embryos in development, Colossal brings Viagen’s high-efficiency cloning and cryopreservation tech under its roof.
🔹 Hippocratic AI raises $126M Series C at $3.5B valuation — Backed by Avenir, a16z, General Catalyst, and CapitalG, the company claims over 115M patient interactions with zero safety incidents, deploying non-diagnostic AI agents across 50+ global healthcare orgs including Cleveland Clinic and Sheba.
🔹 Coherence Neuro raises $10M to merge neurotech and cancer care — Coherence is developing an implantable BCI platform to monitor and treat cancer via the nervous system, aiming to enable real-time prediction models and adaptive therapies.
🔹 Synchron raises $200M to scale non-surgical brain implants — Backed by Double Point Ventures, the BCI company is developing vascularly delivered devices to access multiple brain regions without invasive surgery, positioning itself as a scalable alternative to surgical implants like Neuralink.
🔹 AI-powered care coordination — Tala Health raises $100M to expand its AI agents supporting clinicians across the patient journey, aiming to streamline care from virtual triage to clinician referral, with backing led by Sofreh Capital.
🔹 Revvity to acquire ACD/Labs to bolster Signals software — the deal adds ACD/Labs’ spectral analysis, ADMET prediction, and analytical data tools to Revvity’s Signals platform, expanding capabilities across molecular design, process chemistry, and manufacturing in pharma and materials science.
🔹 arcoris bio raises CHF 6.3M to scale digital pathology platform — backed by Ventura Ace and ZEISS Ventures, the Swiss startup will accelerate industrialization of its nanotech platform which enables high-sensitivity, multiplex biomarker detection for diagnostics and drug discovery.
🔹 Evommune raised $172.5M in its IPO, debuting under the ticker EVMN, as it advances small molecule and biologic therapies for chronic inflammatory diseases, including an oral mast cell-targeting program.
🔹 LambdaVision raises $7M to scale space-made artificial retina — the startup uses microgravity manufacturing aboard the ISS to produce protein-based implants aimed at restoring vision lost to retinal diseases, with funding to advance toward clinical trials.
⚙️ Other Tech
(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)
🔹 INBRAIN partners with Microsoft on AI-driven neurotech — graphene-based BCI company is teaming with Microsoft to develop agentic AI systems for real-time precision neurology, aiming to create adaptive, closed-loop therapeutics for neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and epilepsy.
🔹 Spider-inspired soft robots offer noninvasive gut diagnostics — researchers in Macau have developed a magnetic, rolling microbot modeled on the golden wheel spider, capable of navigating the digestive tract to replace invasive endoscopy, with potential future applications in targeted drug delivery and minimally invasive treatment.
🔹 CRISPR delivery risks resurface in liver toxicity case — Intellia paused two phase 3 trials after a patient death linked to liver injury from its LNP-delivered CRISPR therapy.
🔹 FDA Pulls Back on uniQure’s Huntington’s Gene Therapy Plan — despite phase 1/2 data showing a 75% disease progression slowdown with AMT-130, the FDA now says the external control group is insufficient for accelerated approval.
🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society
(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)
🔹 Arena BioWorks shuts down just 2 years after $500M launch — the private research institute, founded to fund high-risk, Bell Labs–style biomedical science, is closing after failing to sustain its startup spinout-driven business model, despite initial backing to support a decade of operations.
🔹 Recursion appoints Najat Khan as CEO — Co-founder Chris Gibson steps into Board Chair role as the AI-driven biotech marks a leadership transition to guide its next growth phase.
🔹 From Meta to Meta — Chan Zuckerberg Biohub is acquiring EvolutionaryScale’s 50-person team, appointing Alex Rives as CZI’s Head of Science to succeed Steve Quake; no deal terms disclosed. The arc: ex-Meta protein-AI group spun out, raised a $142M seed with no CEO, and now returns via a Biohub acquihire.
🚀 A New Kid on the Block
(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)
🔹 Accipiter Bio debuts with $12.7M and dual-targeting protein drugs — Spun out of Nobel laureate David Baker’s lab, Seattle-based Accipiter Biosciences emerges with AI-designed de novo proteins that bind multiple disease targets at once, securing partnerships with Pfizer (deal worth up to $330M) and Kite Pharma to advance multifunctional therapies for cancer, IBS, and beyond.
Read also:
Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape