Weekly Tech+Bio Highlights #72-73: Mid-Month Rundown
Mid-February highlights across AI drug discovery, gene therapy lane, IPO and M&A watch, and a few broader ecosystem notes
Not too much (relatively) happened so far this month on the techbio front we track, especially after the front-loaded start to January 2026. This issue is a mid-month rundown of the news we noted so far. If something stood out to you that we did not include, do let us know!
A few things worth prefacing with include Isomorphic Labs’ benchmarking of its drug design engine, Takeda’s multi-year AI drug discovery partnership with Iambic Therapeutics (note: last year, Iambic had early Phase 1 readouts for its AI-designed cancer drug), Generate:Biomedicines filing for an IPO, Lilly’s up to $2.4B Orna Therapeutics deal to enter in vivo CAR-T, and Sanofi’s fast-moving CEO change. To note—the launch of a new startup (backed by a16z/Menlo’s Anthology) and its “integrated biology environment” lab for running biomedical research.
We also had a new contribution piece from ICON plc on how digital health technologies are moving from pilots into core clinical development strategy, plus a short Women and Girls in Science Day roundup focused on prominent women working across the AI and life science stack.
For paid subscribers, we looked at the recent uptick in big pharma deals with China, and the prominence of advanced therapeutic modalities in recent headlines.
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🤖 AI x Bio
(AI applications in drug discovery, biotech, and healthcare)
🔹 Isomorphic Labs benchmarked its IsoDDE “drug design engine,” claiming it goes beyond AlphaFold 3 by better generalizing on hard protein–ligand cases (incl. cryptic pockets/induced fit) plus stronger antibody-antigen modeling and binding-affinity prediction to help rank pockets and candidates for drug discovery.
🔹 Takeda signed a multi-year AI drug-discovery partnership with San Diego-based Iambic Therapeutics worth up to ~$1.7B in milestones to apply Iambic’s generative small-molecule platform across oncology, GI, and inflammation. Iambic also disclosed a new $20M investment from Ireland’s ISIF (on top of an oversubscribed $100M financing) as it plans to expand engineering hires there.
🔹 Ginkgo Bioworks + OpenAI say a GPT-5-driven autonomous lab ran 36,000 experiments and cut cell-free protein synthesis costs 40% (to ~$422/gram) in a new preprint.
🔹 Terray Therapeutics updated its diffusion-free TerraBind potency model, claiming ~26x faster and lower-cost inference than diffusion approaches (e.g., Boltz-2) while improving correlation to experimental binding data, building on its EMMI platform’s recent Bristol Myers Squibb milestone.
🔹 Insilico Medicine and China Medical System (CMS) teamed up on AI-driven drug discovery in CNS and autoimmune diseases, planning to co-develop at least two programs using Insilico’s Pharma.AI plus CMS’s clinical/regulatory/commercial expertise. Insilico is set to receive R&D funding of “several tens of millions” HKD per program.
🔹 Unlearn will supply AI “digital twin” external comparators for VectorY’s single-arm PIONEER-ALS Phase 1/2 trial of VTx-002, an AAV gene-delivered anti–TDP-43 antibody, to strengthen efficacy readouts where placebo controls are hard to run.
🔹 Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome authors (YouTube roundtable) explain their Nature-published DNA sequence-to-function model for decoding the 98% non-coding genome, released in June 2025, highlighting long-context (up to ~1M bp) high-resolution TPU breakthroughs and an API to rapidly score variant effects for disease research.
🔹 San Francisco-based Tahoe Therapeutics says it’s building the largest single-cell atlas of cell-chemical interactions by combining INTEGRA automated pipetting with Parse Biosciences’ scRNA-seq and its own AI.
🔹 In Nature Medicine, researchers introduce SleepFM, a multimodal sleep foundation model trained on ~585,000 hours of polysomnography from 65,000+ people that can predict future risk for 130 diseases from a single night (e.g., mortality C-index 0.84, dementia 0.85, MI 0.81).
🔹 Anthropic partnered with HHMI (Janelia/AI@HHMI) and the Allen Institute to embed Claude-powered agents into lab workflows for experiment interpretation, hypothesis generation, and multimodal/omics analysis, with real-world feedback guiding future Claude research versions.
🔹 Inductive Bio won the OpenADMET-ExpansionRx blind challenge with its Beacon ML models, topping 370+ submissions by predicting nine ADMET endpoints on unseen compounds from real discovery programs.
💰 Money Flows
(Funding rounds, IPOs, and M&A for startups and smaller companies)
💰 QuantX Biosciences closes an oversubscribed $85M Series B co-led by LAV and Sanofi Ventures to push its oral STAT6 and IL-17 small-molecule inhibitors toward the clinic, powered by a computational discovery platform that blends physics-based modeling, statistical/AI methods, and high-performance computing to design and optimize drug candidates.
🔹 Pfizer joins Basel-based BaseLaunch as its 7th pharma partner, expanding the incubator’s support network for early-stage biotech creation through Series A. BaseLaunch says its 27 portfolio companies have raised $1B+ collectively, with several already in Phase II.
🔹 Biotech IPOs look to be thawing in early 2026 (e.g., Aktis $318M, Eikon $381M, Agomab $200M), with PitchBook-linked estimates pointing to ~30–35 biotech IPOs in 2026 vs 11 in 2025 as investors favor clinical-stage/product-led stories.
🔹 Colossal Biosciences struck a “nine-figure deal” with the UAE to build a Dubai BioVault and lab at the Museum of the Future, aiming to store genetic material from 10,000+ species (millions of samples) as part of a planned global network of biodiversity “backup” vaults.
🔹 Flagship’s Generate:Biomedicines (an AI/ML-driven protein + antibody design company) filed to pursue an IPO to fund Phase 3 severe-asthma studies of its long-acting anti-TSLP antibody GB-0895.
🚜 Market Movers
(News from established pharma and tech giants)
🔹 Lilly is buying Massachusetts-based Orna Therapeutics for up to $2.4B to enter in vivo CAR-T, using Orna’s circular RNA + lipid nanoparticle platform led by CD19 program ORN-252 for B-cell autoimmune diseases.
🔹 Sanofi is replacing CEO Paul Hudson with Merck KGaA CEO Belén Garijo (interim CEO Olivier Charmeil from Feb 17; Garijo starts Apr 29).
🔹 FDA refused to file Moderna’s mRNA flu shot application over trial design/comparator concerns, and Moderna publicly pushed back while warning it could complicate its combo flu-COVID plans.
🔹 Google DeepMind says Gemini Deep Think plus an agentic “verifier-reviser” workflow (Aletheia) can tackle research-level math/CS/physics problems—reporting progress from IMO/ICPC-level results to papers and case studies where the system iteratively checks, fixes, and sometimes refutes conjectures using literature/web-assisted reasoning.
🧬 Gene Therapy Lane
In vivo cell/gene therapy was a major theme at Advanced Therapies Week in San Diego, with speakers citing easier access vs ex vivo (potentially avoiding lymphodepleting chemo) and pointing to momentum from deals like Lilly’s $2.4B Orna buy and Regeneron-Tessera, though many cautioned investment is running ahead of human data.
Negatives
➖ FDA put Regenxbio’s MPS I (RGX-111) and MPS II/Hunter (RGX-121) gene therapy trials on hold after a child developed a brain tumor found on MRI 4 years post-dose (preliminarily linked to AAV integration/PLAG1 overexpression). The agency also sent a Feb 7 CRL for RGX-121, citing trial design/external control and surrogate endpoint concerns and asking for more/longer controlled data.
➖ Lilly dropped three clinical-stage programs, including Prevail’s GRN gene therapy for frontotemporal dementia for lack of efficacy.
➖ uniQure paused dosing of its AAV gene therapy in the mid- and high-dose cohorts after two patients had asymptomatic Grade 3 liver enzyme elevations that improved with steroids.
Positives
➕ Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics expect Casgevy to ramp in 2026, projecting ~3x higher sales as more patients move through the infusion pipeline and insurance coverage reaches ~90% of eligible U.S. patients.
➕ Madrigal licensed six preclinical liver-targeted siRNA programs for MASH from China’s Ribo Life Science (and Sweden’s Ribocure) for $60M upfront plus up to $4.4B in milestones, aiming to pair gene-silencing therapies with its THR-β drug Rezdiffra.
➕ Ultragenyx reported UX111 gene therapy shows sustained cognitive/functional benefits in Sanfilippo A with up to ~8.5 years follow-up across two studies, and the company resubmitted its FDA application (previously CRL’d on CMC/manufacturing issues) expecting a ~6-month review.
⚙️ Other Tech
(Innovations across quantum computing, BCIs, gene editing, and more)
🔹 Northwestern researchers built an advanced human spinal cord organoid injury model and showed their “dancing molecules” supramolecular therapy boosted neurite outgrowth and reduced glial scarring in injured organoids, supporting its translational potential after prior paralysis-reversal results in animals.
🔹 SK bioscience began a Phase 1/2 trial in Australia of GBP511, a UW Institute for Protein Design nanoparticle vaccine that displays pieces of four coronaviruses to target sarbecoviruses (incl. COVID-19), backed by ~$65M from CEPI.
🏛️ Bioeconomy & Society
(News on centers, regulatory updates, and broader biotech ecosystem developments)
🔹 Next-gen obesity drugs like Novo Nordisk’s CagriSema and Lilly’s triple-agonist retatrutide are showing ~23–30% weight loss in trials—potentially beating Wegovy/Zepbound—but clinicians warn “too much, too fast” loss may raise risks like gallstones and muscle loss.
🔹 The U.S. Department of Energy launched the Genesis Mission Consortium, a public-private partnership to speed AI-driven scientific discovery via working groups on AI models, data standards, HPC/cloud, and robotics/automation, administered by TechWerx (RTI).
🔹 HHS/BARDA and VITAL launched a $100M SMART Prize to spur broad-spectrum small-molecule antivirals for Togaviridae/Flaviviridae viruses (e.g., dengue, Zika, West Nile, chikungunya), with submissions due May 11, 2026.
🚀 A New Kid on the Block
(Emerging startups with a focus on technology)
🔹 Stanford spinout Phylo launched with a $13.5M seed round (a16z + Menlo’s Anthology, with Anthropic) and unveiled Biomni Lab, an “Integrated Biology Environment” that uses agentic AI to run biomedical research workflows across connected tools and databases.
Women and Girls in Science Day, Seen Through the AI-Life Science Stack
For February 11, the UN-designated International Day of Women and Girls in Science, themed «Synergizing AI, Social Science, STEM and Finance», we put together a quick, tech-forward roundup of women working across the AI and life science interface, spanning research, product-building, and capital decisions.
Featured: Daphne Koller (Founder and CEO, insitro), Alice Zhang (Founder and CEO, Verge Genomics), Suchi Saria (Founder, Bayesian Health; Director, Machine Learning and Healthcare Lab, Johns Hopkins), Regina Barzilay (Professor, MIT CSAIL; AI faculty lead, MIT Jameel Clinic), Jen Asher, Ph.D. (Founder and CEO, 1910 Genetics).
Also: Dr. Najat Khan, PhD (CEO and President, Recursion), Michelle Lee (Founder and CEO, Medra), Dr. Charlotte Bunne (EPFL), Dr. Effy Vayena (ETH Zurich), Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi (MIT), Dr. Emma Pierson (UC Berkeley), Dr. Finale Doshi Velez (Harvard).
These names are by no means exhaustive and many other women are shaping how AI enters biology and medicine in equally substantive ways. We hope this serves as a small acknowledgment of that work and as encouragement for more women to lead in the sciences.
Company Watchlist: AI for De-Risking Clinical Trials
Clinical development still runs into an asymmetry of only around one in ten drug candidates that enter human testing reaching approval, and Phase II and III failures account for a lot of wasted R&D spend. In this watchlist, we look at AI’s attempt to use more of the signal that existing de-risking methods can leave on the table.
We profiled a few companies to watch in 2026 across three layers of this “de-risking” stack:
how studies are designed
how control evidence is assembled
how trials are run and analyzed operationally
ICON plc on Digital health Tech in Clinical Development
This contribution piece from ICON plc authors Caprice Sassano and Keith Thomas argues that digital health technologies (DHTs) are moving from pilots into core trial strategy, in a context of rising costs and increasingly complex timelines. The authors link that shift to regulators encouraging patient-centric designs and real-world data, and they frame the practical question as less “if” and more “how” DHTs get integrated.
Their concrete example is SV95C, stride velocity 95th centile, described as the first wearable-derived primary digital endpoint used in Duchenne muscular dystrophy trials, captured with an ankle-worn sensor. The authors contrast this with the six-minute walk test as a point-in-time clinic assessment, and they point to the EMA’s 2023 acceptance of SV95C as a milestone for digital endpoints.
Read also:
Three Big Ideas in Aging Research That Could Shift the Therapeutic Landscape