Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #67: Wrapping Up 2025
First-wave drug builder steps back from the clinic, platform-native developer heads for IPO, a model-discovered drug enters Phase 1, pharma licenses external discovery capacity
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🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 AI-first reset — Verge Genomics dropped its only clinical ALS candidate after a Phase 1 failure and is pivoting back to its core AI drug discovery platform, focusing on scaling its machine-learning models and human datasets rather than advancing in-house clinical programs.
🔹 Multimodal biology world model — Bioptimus released M-Optimus, a foundation model trained across histology, transcriptomics, and clinical data from millions of patients, designed to link cellular, tissue, and patient-level biology for drug discovery, trial design, and in-silico simulations, with early access opened to pharma users.
🔹 World models enter clinical AI — Nabla partnered exclusively with Advanced Machine Intelligence, founded by Yann LeCun, to access next-generation AI “world models” aimed at enabling safer, FDA-certifiable agentic systems in healthcare, strengthening Nabla’s long-term clinical AI strategy.
🔹 Antibodies with low immunogenicity — Latent Labs unveiled a new generative AI model that produces antibody and peptide drug candidates showing strong binding and low immune activation in ex vivo human assays, following its $50M launch from stealth in February.
🔹 AI-designed antibodies near clinic — New open-source and commercial AI models are enabling fast, precise antibody design, with teams reporting strong target binding after testing as few as ~15 AI-generated candidates, signaling that AI-designed antibodies may soon enter clinical trials.
🔹 AI-designed proteins — Galux entered a research agreement with Boehringer Ingelheim to explore AI-driven precision protein design for therapeutics to create purpose-built proteins, following Galux’s recent success in de novo antibody design.
🔹 AI obesity drug enters clinic — Enveda received US FDA IND clearance and dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of a once-daily oral small-molecule therapy for chronic weight management, discovered using its AI-driven chemical biodiversity platform.
🔹 Revvity launched an AI models-as-a-service platform that embeds predictive molecular and materials design models directly into lab workflows, linking in-silico design with experimental data; early access planned for 1H 2026.
🔹 AI biologics company updates pipeline — Reporting Q2 FY2026 results, MindWalk said its AI-designed GLP-1 receptor agonist exceeded semaglutide in vitro and that it identified a conserved epitope for a potential universal dengue vaccine.
🔹 Causal genomics at scale — Parse Biosciences and Codebreaker Labs partnered to pair large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing with engineered variants, enabling parallel functional testing of thousands of variants and generation of causal genomic data for AI model training.
🔹 Drugging hard targets — Talus Bio and PRISM BioLab formed a research collaboration combining AI-driven regulome profiling with small-molecule chemistry to discover new modulators of transcription factors and protein–protein interactions, aiming to generate first-in-class compounds against historically undruggable targets.
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🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
🔹 Oral GLP-1 milestone — Novo Nordisk received FDA approval for the first once-daily oral GLP-1 therapy for obesity, showing ~16.6% average weight loss over 64 weeks in trials, a move expected to broaden uptake beyond injections and intensify competition with Eli Lilly as obesity drugs become a core big-pharma market.
🔹 HIV phase 3 switch success — Gilead reported a second late-stage win for a two-drug, single-tablet HIV regimen, showing noninferiority to its standard therapy in virologically suppressed patients, clearing the path for regulatory filings and a potential 2027 launch.
🔹 Pan-KRAS China deal — AstraZeneca struck a licensing deal with Jacobio Pharma worth up to $2B for an early-stage pan-KRAS inhibitor in Phase I trials, paying $100M upfront with milestones and royalties, and taking ex-China development and commercialization rights.
🔹 Multispecific antibody deal — Harbour BioMed partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb on multispecific antibody discovery and early development, securing $90M upfront with up to ~$1.1B in development and commercial milestones, leveraging Harbour’s fully human antibody platform and China-based clinical capabilities.
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
🔹 AI drug developer targets IPO — Insilico Medicine is seeking about $292M in Hong Kong IPO following major private funding, expanded AI drug discovery partnerships with Eli Lilly, and Phase 2a clinical data for its lead fibrosis program.
🔹 NVIDIA-backed AI drug discovery — In parallel to the recent Novartis partnership, Relation Therapeutics disclosed an additional $26M investment from insiders including NVIDIA’s nVentures, DCVC, and Magnetic Ventures.
🔹 Autonomous AI scientists — Edison Scientific, a Future House spin-out building AI systems that automate large parts of scientific research, raised $70M to scale an “AI scientist” platform that handles literature analysis, hypothesis generation, molecular design, and experiment planning across drug discovery and related fields.
🔹 AI oncology target discovery deal — Genentech partnered with Caris Life Sciences on an AI-driven cancer target discovery collaboration, paying $25M upfront with up to $1.1B in milestones and royalties tied to solid tumor precision medicine programs.
🔹 AI-driven CNS drug discovery — MapLight Therapeutics partnered with Alphabet spinout SandboxAQ to discover CNS drugs using AI-based GPCR modeling, paying an undisclosed upfront with up to $200M in milestones, while MapLight retains clinical and commercial control.
🔹 Vertical AI funding — Manifold, which builds AI workflows for life sciences research and clinical data, raised an $18M Series B led by Reach Capital to expand its platform used for tasks spanning discovery, clinical development, and precision medicine.
🔹 Virtual heart safety models — InSilicoTrials and The Jackson Laboratory are leading a $30M ARPA-H–funded program to use AI and computational heart models to predict drug-induced cardiac risk, aiming to replace animal testing with human-relevant digital simulations in early drug safety.
🔹 AI maps gene function at scale — insitro validated its pooled CRISPR and self-supervised imaging platform in Nature Communications, showing it can map gene function at genome scale and recover ~2.5x more functional relationships than conventional target-discovery methods.
🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society
(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)
🔹 China biotech momentum — US Senate-mandated report warned China is rapidly outpacing the US in parts of biopharma innovation, citing faster clinical trial approvals, a surge in global licensing deals (from 5% in 2022 to 42% in early 2025), and higher trial volume than the US, prompting calls for a $15B US government response to retain competitiveness.
🔹 FDA expands real-world data use — The FDA said it will accept broader, deidentified real-world datasets in certain medical device submissions, allowing large registry and EHR-based evidence to be reviewed case by case, with potential future expansion to drugs and biologics.
🔹 US Biosecurity law advances — The U.S. House passed a defense bill including the Biosecure Act, which limits U.S. biopharma ties with certain Chinese biotech firms over national security and genetic data concerns; awaiting final Senate approval and presidential signature.
🔹 Federal AI infrastructure push — Accenture Federal Services partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy to support the Genesis Mission, a national program to connect supercomputers, scientific data, and AI models, with Accenture contributing platform architecture, data curation, and AI-driven automation for large-scale scientific research.
🚀 A New Kid on the Block
(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)
🔹 All-RNA gene insertion — Addition Therapeutics emerged from stealth with $106.5M in funding to develop gene therapies based on RNA-only retrotransposons (“jumping genes”), aiming to precisely insert full genes into the genome without CRISPR or DNA-based editing.
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