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Drug discovery has never had a richer therapeutic toolbox. Antibody-drug conjugates, antisense oligonucleotides, CRISPR therapeutics, RNA medicines, CAR-T cells, PROTACs, and molecular glues have transformed how medicine can manipulate biology. Yet every modality still depends on the same prerequisite: a biologically meaningful target. Many of the roughly 20,000 canonical human genes and their protein products are poor therapeutic candidates because they lack disease relevance, cannot be addressed by certain modalities, or cause unacceptable side effects when manipulated. Perhaps the limiting factor is not only how we drug biology, but how much biology we know.

Recently, Iambic Therapeutics has filed to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker IAM, adding another closely watched name to a biotech IPO market that has begun to reopen after one of its weakest years in recent memory.

Novo Nordisk has entered a strategic partnership with OpenAI to integrate AI systems across its research, manufacturing, and commercial workflows. Initial pilot programs are expected across R&D, manufacturing, and commercial units, with broader rollout planned through 2026.

In a recent large-scale code modernization initiative, a team used generative AI to convert a clinical data standards library from one programming language to another. Nearly 80% of the templates transitioned automatically, compressing what would have been months of manual effort into a fraction of the time. Yet the remaining third, platform-specific functions, nuanced derivations, and intricate data transformations, still required deep human expertise to refine and validate. The real story is the shift in ownership.

Three AI drug discovery companies raised a combined $526 million on September 23 and 24. One mines plants and microbes for new medicines. One trains its models on what it calls the world's largest proprietary genomic dataset. The third runs an automated lab that makes and tests more than 2,000 molecules a week.

Boston-based Nia Therapeutics has received FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for its Smart Neurostimulation System (SNS), an implantable brain-computer interface (BCI) aimed at treating episodic memory loss in adults with prior moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury. The designation applies to a patient population with limited treatment options, where no FDA-cleared therapies currently address memory impairment directly.

After reporting the first patient dosed in September 2025, early clinical data from a small open-label study indicate that Enveda’s oral candidate, discovered via the company’s PRISM AI platform, ENV-294, produced rapid reductions in disease severity and itch in patients with moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis, alongside a safety profile without serious adverse events.

In the latest news, Novo Nordisk has entered a collaboration with Anthropic aimed at speeding the discovery and development of new medicines. An initial project will test Anthropic's Claude Science on specific R&D workflows where the companies expect the greatest impact, and Novo also plans to use the models to strengthen software development so it can scale AI use across the company. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Biotech treats DNA primarily as a coding material that provides information about disease phenotypes and can serve as a drug target and modality. But beyond the code, DNA is also an attractive programmable nanomaterial. By exploiting the predictability of Watson–Crick base pairing, researchers can create self-assembled DNA nanostructures with nanometer-scale precision.

AlSO: The Numbers Behind China's Biopharma Ascent. Everyone is talking about how Anthropic AI lab now designs drugs, hires the AlphaFold Nobel laureate, and ships Claude Science alongside Claude Code. Also, their partnership with Basecamp Research (i.e. EDEN-designed antibiotic peptides 97% active against WHO priority pathogens), integration of Claude Science with Boltz, and so on. There is a real movement.

Some field notes from the cutting edge of modern bioinformatics (CoFold Summit and Free Energy Workshop, both held recently in Barcelona, Spain). ALSO: several companies to watch in techbio space. Everyone is talking about frontier AI models and agents. But the most interesting conversations I had in Barcelona earlier this month during two cutting-edge bioinformatics events pointed in a different direction.

Earendil Labs has secured $787 million in financing to expand its AI-based biologics discovery and development platform, with backing from investors including Dimension Capital, DST Global, Sanofi, and a biotech fund formed by Hillhouse and Pfizer. The funding is intended to support pipeline expansion, team growth, and advancement of multiple antibody programs toward clinical stages.

After emerging from stealth with a $50 million seed round last year, Latent Labs presents Latent-Y, an AI system that can generate antibody candidates directly from written research goals, reportedly moving from concept to lab-tested molecules within hours, with a subsequent technical report (pdf). The system is designed to increase the number of design programs a single researcher can run, with initial validation showing binding activity across multiple biological targets.

Isomorphic Labs has raised about $2.7 billion from outside investors since 2025. Its president, Max Jaderberg, says its drug design engine works, but the company has not publicly named a drug candidate.

This week Insilico Medicine, an AI-driven drug discovery company, reported an unusual experiment. Arguably for the first time, aging biomarkers were written prospectively into a controlled trial run for a conventional disease indication.  Six proteomic aging clocks were applied to serum banked during the completed phase 2a of rentosertib in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and all six returned lower predicted biological age in the treated arms than in placebo, by three to four years at the week-four peak and as much as six years on one model. The analysis appeared in Nature Biotechnology, with co-authors from Harvard, Stanford, the Broad Institute, Peking University and Westlake University.

Merck has entered a discovery collaboration with Quotient Therapeutics, committing $20 million upfront to access Somatic Genomics, an AI-enabled platform that analyzes somatic mutations directly in patient tissues. The agreement focuses on identifying new drug targets for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with potential milestone payments bringing the total deal value to $2.2 billion.

I spent last week in Amsterdam, attending HLTH Europe 2026, arguably Europe's flagship healthcare innovation event, hosting more than 5,000 attendees. It is my second HLTH experience, and two additions to this year's program stood out: last year's Pharma & Life Sciences Spotlight grew into a full two-day Global Pharma Summit aimed at C-suite from 30-plus pharma and biotech organizations across 20-plus countries, and the floor gained a dedicated AI @ HLTH zone with its own stage dedicated completely to the progress of artificial intelligence in healthcare and clinical research.

Tempus and Daiichi Sankyo have entered a collaboration to apply multimodal AI models and real-world clinical data to an oncology antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) program. The effort centers on improving patient selection and identifying biomarkers that can differentiate treatment response, aiming to increase clinical trial success rates and refine trial design.

Jeito Capital has closed its second fund, Jeito II, at more than €1 billion, or about $1.2 billion, giving the Paris-based investor a larger pool of capital for clinical-stage biopharma companies in Europe. The firm says the close exceeds its original target and will support 15 to 20 companies, with per-company investments rising to as much as €150 million.

Paris-based techbio Generare has raised €20 million in a Series A round co-led by Alven and daphni, with participation from existing investors. The company is focused on generating previously inaccessible small-molecule data by decoding microbial genomes, aiming to expand the pool of compounds available for drug discovery.

An article published in Nature Biotechnology on 7 September 2026 by Alex Zhavoronkov’s team at Insilico Medicine and collaborators marks an important step forward for the field of drugs targeting aging. Using proteomics-based aging clocks, they showed that rentosertib, an anti-fibrotic that showed positive results in a Phase 2a trial in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, was associated with reductions in predicted biological age based on serum proteomic markers. This is not only a scientific milestone but also a methodological one, pointing the way for the use of aging clocks in trials of geroprotective medicines.

The ongoing collaboration between insitro and Bristol Myers Squibb has been extended to include additional AI-discovered therapeutic targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), with early experimental validation in human neuron models. The nomination of the two new targets triggered a $10 million milestone payment to insitro.

Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly have entered a multi-program AI-driven drug discovery collaboration, combining Insilico’s generative modeling platforms with Lilly’s clinical and commercialization infrastructure. Under the agreement, Insilico receives $115 million upfront, with potential milestone payments bringing the total deal value to approximately $2.75 billion, in addition to tiered royalties on future product sales.

Meta has released TRIBE v2, an open-source foundation model designed to predict human brain responses to visual and auditory stimuli and construct a digital twin of neural activity. The model is trained on more than 500 hours of fMRI recordings from over 700 individuals and builds on an architecture previously benchmarked in the Algonauts 2025 challenge. It supports zero-shot predictions across new subjects, languages, and task settings.

Boston-based Life Biosciences, co-founded by David Sinclair, has closed an $80 million Series D financing to fund its first-in-human clinical program and extend operations into 2027. The capital is allocated primarily to a Phase 1 trial of ER-100 in optic neuropathies and to further development of its Partial Epigenetic Reprogramming platform, which aims to modify cellular aging processes at the transcriptional level.

Bioptimus launched the Spatial Tissue Embedding Learning Atlas (STELA), a large-scale, clinically linked multimodal dataset spanning oncology and immunology. The global initiative, spanning data from patients from three continents, was developed with 10x Genomics and Broad Clinical Laboratories.

Ginkgo Bioworks' (NYSE: DNA) Datapoints arm, Tangible Scientific, and Inductive Bio today launched ADME-One, a single-SKU service that combines a Tier 1 ADME panel, AI-driven human pharmacokinetic projection, and compound management. It is the first product to come out of the three-way partnership the companies announced in August 2025, which committed them to a lab-in-the-loop workflow in which experimental ADME data flows back into Inductive's models for retraining.

A San Francisco startup Epia Neuro launched today with a minimally invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to help stroke survivors regain motor function by reading what the brain intends to do and translating that into actual movement.

Anthropic is reported to have acquired Coefficient Bio, a recently founded AI-driven biotech startup with a team of less than ten people, in a transaction valued at approximately $400 million in stock. The deal centers on integrating a small, technically focused team working on AI-enabled biological research into Anthropic’s expanding life sciences effort, which spans preclinical discovery through regulatory workflows.

Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI released new frontier models, specifically, Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 and a restricted variant called Mythos 5.1, while OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra. OpenAI president, Greg Brockman went as far as suggesting this might be the model people later point to as the start of the AGI era — a claim complicated by his own CEO, Sam Altman, calling AGI "an irrelevant marketing term" days earlier. Anthropic made no comparable claim. Anyway, without speculating about the hype or the “AGI era” claims, let’s focus on specific aspects relating to the life sciences and science in general.

Clockwork Bio has been launched as a new AI-native biotech focused on redesigning early-stage oncology drug discovery. The company is developing a platform centered on modeling and controlling cell state transitions, aiming to address limitations in current pipelines that struggle with complex, heterogeneous diseases such as cancer.