drug discovery

AI drug-design startup Chai Discovery raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation, nearly tripling its worth in seven months as Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novartis sign on.

Anthropic released Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists with more than 60 curated skills, in beta to paid Claude subscribers, and said it has started an internal program to develop treatments for neglected diseases.

GPT-5.4 paired with Molecule.one's Maria platform proposed, ran, and analyzed a 10,080-reaction campaign that lifted yields of a hard sulfonamide coupling using the additive TEMPO.

ETH Zurich researchers report that aggregates of inactivated GRK2 choke mitochondria and fuel amyloid beta, and that an experimental molecule, compound 10, slowed nerve cell death in mice.

McMaster-led researchers report in Nature a depsipeptide antibiotic that blocks the bacterial ribosome's E-site, a target no existing drug uses.

Sanofi will license Owkin's K Pro platform for five years and co-develop autonomous AI agents for drug R&D, extending a partnership that began in 2021 and made Owkin a unicorn.

Google Quantum AI and Google.org are funding five universities to develop quantum sensors and algorithms for molecular biology, targeting drug discovery and human health.

OpenAI's first domain-specific model for biology and drug discovery connects to 50+ scientific databases and outperformed human experts on RNA sequence tasks, but faces established rivals and a decade-long clinical validation gap.

The Danish pharmaceutical giant will integrate OpenAI's frontier models across R&D, manufacturing, and supply chain, with full deployment targeted by year-end.

A Chinese research team has shown that timed doses of 3'-deoxyadenosine can amplify circadian rhythms in one hypothalamic nucleus, roll back epigenetic age, and extend lifespan in aged male mice.

A Japanese research team has identified a small molecule called Mic-628 that advances the mammalian circadian clock by activating the Period1 gene through a previously unexploited molecular pathway, cutting simulated jet lag recovery from seven days to four in mice after a single oral dose.