Insights / Function
Field notes on Pre-clinical Research — how AI, in-silico methods, and platform tech are reshaping the earliest stages of drug discovery.
32 posts in Pre-clinical research
9 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Anthropic benchmarked Claude Opus 4.7 against ChemDraw and MestReNova on NMR prediction and structure elucidation, and the general model matched the specialist tools. The read for techbio: encoded domain knowledge is becoming a default capability of general models.
21 May 2026 · 1 min read
Nature published three AI scientist systems on the same day this week — FutureHouse's Robin, Google's Co-Scientist, and ERA — and the detail that matters for pharma is what they run on. Peer review commoditised the reasoning; the real edge still sits in proprietary data and lab throughput that these systems cannot reach.
19 May 2026 · 3 min read
AstraZeneca's licensing of Owkin's K Pro platform signals where agentic AI is actually landing in pharma right now — competitive intelligence — not the broader scientific autonomy the positioning implies. I break down which workflows are realistic today and why the teams that start with unglamorous, high-leverage tasks will be best positioned when the harder problems become tractable.
14 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The hyperscalers are moving on drug discovery from every direction — Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio, and AWS just launched Amazon Bio Discovery with 40+ biological foundation models and integrated CRO partners. I still don't think the commercial model of pharma is under major threat, but the R&D part is clearly heating up massively.
7 Apr 2026 · 4 min read
Most coverage frames the Coefficient Bio acquisition as a valuation story: $44M per head, a 38,000% return, eight months old, no product, no revenue. All true. All missing the point. Anthropic bought the scientific decision layer.
31 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
Eli Lilly’s third Insilico deal in three years: $115M upfront, up to $2.75B in milestones, plus royalties. The progression from software licensing in 2023 to a $2.75B commitment in 2026 tells the real story. The signal for the rest of the AI drug discovery space is harder to read — deals like this concentrate pharma attention on proven platforms.
26 Mar 2026 · 3 min read
A company you’ve most likely never heard of just raised $787M for AI-driven biologics. The headline number is striking. Sanofi’s trajectory — partner to repeat customer to investor in under twelve months — tells you more about the platform than any press release. The Delaware-incorporated, Beijing-operating structure is the emerging architecture for Chinese AI biotech going global.
10 Mar 2026 · 4 min read
Three big AI drug discovery launches in 90 days: Boltz, IsoDDE, OpenFold3. Every benchmark was built by the team that built the model. The real question isn’t which model has the best benchmark. It’s whether discovery teams have a rigorous internal framework to evaluate any model that shows up. The real moat is evaluation discipline.
3 Mar 2026 · 2 min read
Lab-in-the-loop gets talked about like it’s a model problem. The Roche/Novartis/Microsoft panel at health.tech | global summit Basel made the real point clearer: it’s an operating model problem. Most orgs are at Level 1–2 maturity, and that’s already useful — the first big value isn’t more hits, it’s faster, more confident kill decisions.
24 Feb 2026 · 3 min read
Europe keeps asking “will AI in pharma R&D mean fewer jobs?” That’s the wrong question. The right one is who captures the value. Adoption is real but structurally slow. TechBio reshapes the pipeline economy. Data hunger grows. The real risk: while Europe debates headcount, the platforms and IP get built elsewhere.
19 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Two pharma-AI deals in two weeks, two completely different architectures. Takeda paid $1.7B for Iambic. Now Merck skips techbio entirely and runs its AI models inside Mayo Clinic’s secure data environment. The architecture behind the Merck deal is what matters.
17 Feb 2026 · 2 min read
Barely a month goes by without another billion-dollar AI discovery deal. But Takeda’s deal with Iambic isn’t about buying AI — it’s about acquiring binding intelligence. If it works, portfolio strategy shifts from option value through volume to option value through precision. The hard part is industrializing it.
22 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are putting $1B into a co-located Bay Area lab where Lilly scientists and NVIDIA engineers build drug discovery models side by side. Not a typical AI partnership. The real story is closed-loop discovery, and the moat is the loop, not the model.
6 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
Insilico Medicine closed 2025 with a ~US$293M HKEX IPO and opened 2026 with an $888M oncology collaboration with Servier — two major pharma deals in two months that suggest repeatable demand for their AI drug discovery platform.
5 Jan 2026 · 2 min read
I'm sharing my 5 bets for AI in Healthcare and TechBio in 2026 — from ambient scribes becoming table stakes to a TechBio Series B shakeout accelerating. If one of these is wrong, I want to know which one and what would change your mind.
16 Dec 2025 · 3 min read
OpenAI is among the backers of Chai Discovery, a biotech founded in 2024 already valued at $1.3B — and I think the real question isn't whether their antibody design model works, but whether model-layer innovation becomes infrastructure or a durable moat.
11 Dec 2025 · 1 min read
My former colleagues at Novartis just signed a $1.7B deal with a seed-stage company — not for a drug or a molecule, but for targets. This signals a real shift in where pharma sees risk and is willing to pay in the value chain.
9 Dec 2025 · 3 min read
Most AI drug discovery decks assume chemistry will keep up — but small molecule chemistry is still slow, manual, and spread across vendors, which is where a lot of AI 'efficiency' quietly disappears. I look at why fixing chemistry first may be the real unlock, and at the teams finally treating it as the main problem to solve.
1 Dec 2025 · 2 min read
MIT just open-sourced BoltzGen, a generative AI for protein binder design — but I don't think it disrupts AI drug discovery companies any more than Linux killed software. The moat was never the model; it's proprietary data, wet-lab validation, and pharma relationships.
20 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
Jeff Bezos just bet $106M on Profluent, a company using frontier AI models to design proteins that don't exist in nature — and I break down exactly what makes these models 'frontier' and why it matters for programmable biology.
4 Nov 2025 · 1 min read
Eli Lilly just moved from renting compute to owning it — 1,000+ Blackwell B300 GPUs in an on-prem DGX SuperPOD in Indianapolis. Their TuneLab initiative could turn R&D IT from a cost center into a deal channel, and it's further proof that pharma is finally taking AI seriously.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an inspiring talk from Sergei Yakneen, CTO at Isomorphic Labs, at BiotechX2025 in Basel — and it's clear that Google's Alphabet subsidiary is really onto something with their AlphaFold3-powered approach to AI drug discovery at scale.
6 Oct 2025 · 1 min read
I attended an exciting panel on GenAI's impact in preclinical development, featuring voices from Novartis, Insilico Medicine, and INVIDIA. Key themes included the balance of AI opportunity and risk, the power of robotics combined with AI, and the ongoing challenge of data organization and institutional memory in the lab.
22 Sept 2025 · 1 min read
Flagship Pioneering's Lila Sciences just raised $235M in Series A to build AI-and-robotics-powered "science factories" — and I think the full-stack automation thesis is more compelling than AI-alone approaches for drug discovery.
3 Apr 2025 · 1 min read
Google DeepMind's spin-off Isomorphic Labs has just raised $600M from Thrive Capital and GV, the latest mega-round in the blazing AI-enabled drug discovery space. I'm watching closely to see whether bigger funding truly translates to tangible clinical results in this rapidly emerging field.
13 Feb 2025 · 1 min read
I explore whether AI is truly rewriting the rules of drug discovery or just riding a wave of hype — from Latent Labs' €48M funding round to the real-world limits of fully in silico drug development. I genuinely believe we'll see the first 100% AI-discovered drug hit the market within the next 5–7 years.
28 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
It currently feels like a new techbio AI drug discovery play is launched on a weekly basis, showing the AI hype in this field isn't over yet. I'm curious to see how this new generation of companies will fare compared to previous biotech platform plays, given that many steps like MedChem and Toxicology still take time even with AI acceleration.
14 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
One of the first tech-bio deals out of JPM this year sees Insilico Medicine and MENARINI Group deepen their partnership around an AI-discovered asset — not an AI platform — potentially worth up to $550M. I'm curious which business model will emerge as the leader for AI-techbio companies: selling AI platforms and services, or developing your own pipeline.
5 Dec 2024 · 1 min read
Interesting insights on the use of GenAI in Healthcare, from Bayer's Guido Mathews, Medtronic's Irina Evstifeeva and Karista's Amine Benmoussa at Health Tech Forward in Barcelona. From drug discovery and digital twins to medical imaging and workflow efficiency, the panel surfaced where GenAI is maturing — and where it still has a long way to go.
9 Oct 2024 · 1 min read
I attended a fascinating panel on the Hype vs Hope of AI in Drug Discovery at BiotechX in Basel this morning. The conversation surfaced some sharp insights on where AI is genuinely moving the needle in drug discovery — and where the hype still outpaces reality.
10 Sept 2024 · 1 min read
Another significant $120M funding round has landed in AI-driven drug discovery, this time with Lilly leading alongside Nvidia and key VC funds. I'm optimistic that we could be witnessing the birth of the next Amgen, Genentech, or Biogen — powered by AI.
20 Aug 2024 · 1 min read
I'm curious to see how the AI drug discovery space will evolve following the Recursion/Exscientia merger — and I'd personally bet on the traditional biotech drug-development model with AI enablement, rather than a pure SaaS or CRO play.