Insights / Therapeutic Area
Field notes on Oncology — the science, deals, and operating realities of the world's most-funded therapeutic area.
8 posts in Oncology
23 Jul 2026 · 2 min read
Tempus AI is paying $1.5 billion for Personalis, which runs about ten thousand MRD tests versus Natera's roughly 250,000. My read is that Tempus is buying the shape of the data, a record that follows the same patient over time.
2 Jun 2026 · 3 min read
At ASCO this week, AI dominated the oncology agenda — but a Penn abstract pointed at a critical blind spot: the AI information cancer patients actually find online is low quality, hard to read, and silent on risks. The model can be clinically right and still fail at the bedside.
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.
25 Sept 2025 · 1 min read
The NHS is building AIR-SP, a national AI screening cloud that lets every trust plug into shared, real-world trials — starting with a breast-cancer study involving nearly 700,000 women. I think the overall approach makes sense, and I'd love to see other countries adopt something similar.
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.
30 Jan 2025 · 1 min read
I attended the FutureofHealth summit in Dubai today, where leaders from PureHealth and GE HealthCare shared their visions for agentic AI in primary care and oncology — including the bold idea that primary care could become free over time.
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.