Insights / Industry
Field notes on Biotech — the financings, science, and operating realities of building biotech companies in a tough capital cycle.
31 posts in Biotech
1 Oct 2026 · 1 min read
Isomorphic Labs said "Our hypothesis has been proven" in its September 29 update. I still have questions about its business model, and I want evidence of repeat customers or named clinical candidates.
22 Sept 2026 · 1 min read
Anthropic has set up a biology wet lab in the Bay Area, two days after Novo Nordisk signed up to test Claude Science. The lab tightens the loop between model and experiment, and it points to Anthropic selling Claude as the intelligence layer for pharma R&D.
18 Sept 2026 · 2 min read
ByteDance spun out its AI drug discovery unit as Anew Labs, keeping 56% of a $1.5bn company with its own preclinical pipeline. The structure shows how far large AI companies now go into drug development, and why they separate it from the core business.
27 Aug 2026 · 1 min read
Lindus Health sold its CRO business on August 18 and became a drug developer. I think the move exposes a structural problem in the neo-CRO model: the sponsor captures most of the upside from a faster trial.
20 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
Claude designed wet-lab-confirmed protein binders against 14 of 15 targets in a 48-hour campaign. I see this as a glimpse of Anthropic becoming the intelligence layer of drug discovery, coordinating models, compute and labs rather than carrying molecules itself.
18 Aug 2026 · 2 min read
Dario Amodei posted on X that AI could cure most human disease in 5 to 10 years, dropping the conditional framing from his own 2024 essay. I think that timeline is too optimistic, and I doubt Anthropic will become a pharma company.
14 Jul 2026 · 1 min read
I'm marking my own homework on the five AI predictions I made for 2026: two hits, two partials, and one still too early to call at the halfway point.
23 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
Roughly 11,500 Novo Nordisk clinical-trial patient records are allegedly on a leak site, next to the recipe for Ozempic — and the breadth of what was taken is the real story. I argue that the same frontier AI pharma has spent two years asking what it can build is now sharpening the tools that make a terabyte of stolen files instantly usable.
18 Jun 2026 · 2 min read
This week, Merck signed a $510M AI collaboration and PE firm Altaris took Simulations Plus private for ~$375M — both bets on the infrastructure layer beneath the molecule. I think the durable value in drug discovery keeps pooling one level down: whoever owns the data generation and simulation tooling owns the part that compounds.
7 May 2026 · 3 min read
Most AI-first techbios are modeling clinical costs that are roughly half of what they will actually face — and the capital required to put an AI-derived molecule in front of a patient has roughly doubled within the lifespan of one mRNA company. Discovery cost reductions are real and welcome, but the binding constraint sits elsewhere.
30 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
The FDA's first real-time clinical trials don't just promise faster reviews — they insert a new infrastructure layer between sponsors and the agency. I break down what that architectural shift means for clinical development.
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 · 3 min read
Boehringer Ingelheim's new AI and machine learning center in London signals something more specific than another pharma AI announcement — pharma is starting to build permanent capability hubs, not just buy software deals. My bet is that by 2028, the companies with serious in-house computational capability will look structurally different from the ones that outsourced both talent and hardware.
2 Apr 2026 · 3 min read
CRO stocks dropped sharply on AI fears: IQVIA, Medpace, Charles River. The market may be right that AI changes trial economics. It’s wrong about where the disruption lands. CROs are infrastructure companies, and AI should make them more valuable, not less — if they can break free from the cost-plus model.
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.
10 Feb 2026 · 3 min read
The Gulf has three things most emerging life sciences ecosystems lack: sovereign capital, speed of decision making, and political will. What it still needs is the operational layer that turns investment into outcomes — and an investor base that understands the life sciences risk profile.
29 Jan 2026 · 3 min read
Hologen, Eric Schmidt’s stealth biotech-AI venture, is raising $150M at an $850M pre-money on a promise of 100% returns in 12 months. The pitch is closer to financial underwriting than AI product development. Here’s what would convince me it’s more than narrative.
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.
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.
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.
16 Jun 2025 · 1 min read
Anne Wojcicki's company TTAM has outbid Regeneron with a $305M offer to buy back 23andMe's assets — and I'm intrigued about where this goes next.
13 May 2025 · 1 min read
Last week at the AI in Clinical Development Summit 2025 in NYC, I joined a panel tackling the timeless build-or-buy question for pharma AI in clinical development. Our consensus: a "build with" strategy — co-developing with selected strategic AI startup partners — strikes the right balance between speed, fit, and long-term value.
4 Dec 2024 · 1 min read
I attended a fascinating panel at Health Tech Forward on Automation in Clinical Trials featuring in-silico trials and digital twins. Speakers from QuantHealth, a leading VC, and United Therapeutics shared how AI is cutting trial lengths, replacing animal models, and opening new doors for orphan disease research.
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.
2 Jul 2024 · 1 min read
PharmaTech is increasingly becoming a category on its own, with PitchBook launching a dedicated research report and Q1 2024 seeing $749 million in funding across 39 deals. I think it's worth examining how they define the category, given the interesting mix of CDMO/CMO activities and AI enablement they cluster together.
27 Jun 2024 · 1 min read
Despite the challenging fundraising environment, we are witnessing significant investments in AI-enabled drug discovery and development. Formation Bio's nearly $400M Series D and Xaira Therapeutics' emergence from stealth mode signal intensifying competition among major VC funds to lead in AI-powered biotech innovations.