Latest News on TechBio Revolution 🤹
🧬 Imagene’s OI Suite: Revolutionizing Precision Oncology with AI-Driven Solutions
Imagene has won the Innovation Award 🎖️ in Precision Oncology category in the 2025 Pharmaceutical Technology Excellence Awards for its Oncology Intelligence (OI) Suite, a transformative solution that leverages AI and Real-World Data to enhance clinical trial efficiency and accelerate drug development—from biomarker discovery to clinical development and patient stratification (Imagene's OI Suite: Revolutionizing Precision Oncology with AI-Driven Solutions). OI Suite is a SaaS enterprise solution designed to streamline drug development and clinical trial processes through a friendly and intuitive interface. With OI Suite you can upload a labeled cohort of interest, ask diverse questions – such as predicting patient outcomes, identifying predictive biomarkers and train models using limited data in just minutes. Additionally, the platform integrates real-world data to enrich your analyses, enabling you to uncover new and meaningful insights.
Imagene AI—founded in 2020 with a clear mission to empower physicians with immediate oncology intelligence to facilitate optimal treatment for more cancer patients—leverages AI to profile within minutes a broad range of cancer biomarkers from the biopsy image alone. On September 6, 2023, Imagene announced the release of LungOI™, the world's first 🥇 AI-based Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) molecular panel, identifying actionable alterations from the biopsy image alone within minutes. LungOI—an AI-powered laboratory-developed test compatible with various imaging devices, staining protocols and diverse populations—is a multi-gene NSCLC biomarker panel including alterations in the genes EGFR, ALK, ROS1, RET, NTRK1/2/3, ERBB2, BRAF, MET and KRAS demonstrating high performance levels. For example, inference of EGFR mutations in high confidence cases, showed 90% sensitivity and 92% specificity, and for ALK fusions the levels were 97% and 96% respectively. Imagene's technology already had a significant impact on treatment initiation and avoiding brain radiation in lung cancer patients as demonstrated in a recently published case report in the Journal of Clinical Pathology, as part of a clinical study.
On February 5, 2025, Imagene announced a collaboration with Tempus AI, Inc., a technology company leading the adoption of AI to advance precision medicine and patient care. The collaboration aims to advance cancer diagnostics by accelerating biomarker prediction, integrating AI-powered tools into clinical workflows, and enabling the commercialization of accessible diagnostic solutions (Imagene Announces a Collaboration With Tempus to Advance AI-Driven Diagnostics for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer).
🔍 Latest Innovative Report on AI-Driven Peptide Drug Discovery
A newly published report explores how AI is transforming peptide drug discovery, accelerating design, optimization, and development pipelines (Latest Innovative Report On AI-driven Peptide Drug Discovery). The global AI-driven peptide therapeutics market is projected to grow at a CAGR of over 20% through 2030, driven by increased investment and cross-sector collaboration.
💉 Juvena Therapeutics Announces Initiation of First-in-Human Clinical Trial of JUV-161
Juvena Therapeutics has begun a Phase 1 clinical trial of JUV-161, a first-in-class monoclonal antibody targeting age-related muscle 💪 degeneration (Juvena Therapeutics Announces Initiation of First-in-Human Clinical Trial of JUV-161).
Juvena Therapeutics (2017, US) is a computationally-driven biopharmaceutical company decoding secreted proteins (by human stem cells) to screen their potential to restore tissue homeostasis and engineer novel biologic medicines into life-saving treatments and treat myopathies and metabolic diseases. They are achieving this through a fully integrated, end-to-end AI-enabled platform, the ◾JuvNET Platform◾, that combines a diverse protein library, in silico mapping of secreted proteins to specific disease phenotypes, in vitro human cell screening, in vivo pharmacology, and protein engineering capabilities (AI, quantitative proteomics, multi-omics and robotics-enabled high-content imaging and screening). Currently, they are working on:
JUV-161 is a recombinant fusion protein to agonistically target MAPK/ERK and PI3K/AKT regenerative cascades. To advance the preclinical development of JUV-161, Juvena Therapeutics developed a pan-inducible, TREDT960I transgenic mouse 🐭 model containing a human genomic segment containing exons 11-15 of DMPK gene with 960 interrupted CTG repeats (CUG960) under direction of the tetO (tet-responsive element) promoter. This panCUG960/+ murine model encompasses the key aspects of DM1 muscle deterioration, as shown using both functional and histological testing to confirm distal muscle wasting and RNA foci accumulation in impacted tissue. 🚨 On January 23, 2024, Juvena Therapeutics announced that the FDA granted Orphan Drug designation to the company’s flagship candidate, JUV-161, an investigational therapeutic for the treatment of Myotonic Dystrophy Type 1, a rare, multi-systemic, autosomal dominant inherited disease and the most common form of adult muscular dystrophy.
JUV-112, a novel preclinical obesity asset, that uniquely enhances lipid metabolism to induce weight loss 🏋️ through a non appetite-suppressing mechanism.
And other anti obesity (Muscle Target) and undisclosed candidates.
☁️ Cloud-Based Drug Discovery Platform Market Expected to Witness Explosive Growth
The cloud-based drug discovery platform market is anticipated to experience rapid expansion (Projected CAGR: ~25% from 2024–2030), driven by demand for scalable computational infrastructure, rise of AI/ML in target identification and virtual screening, and collaborative R&D models across academia, biotech, and pharma (Cloud-based Drug Discovery Platform Market Expected to Witness).
🧬 Pluto Bio: $3.6 Million Closed For Expanding AI-Based Multi-Omics Analysis Platform for Pharma
Pluto Bio has raised $3.6M in seed funding to scale its AI-powered multi-omics platform, enabling deeper insights into complex diseases and drug responses (Pluto Bio: $3.6 Million Closed For Expanding AI-Based Multi-Omics Analysis Platform For Pharma). The funding round includes participation from new investor Kickstart and existing investor Silverton Partners and angel investors.
💬 “AI is transforming how we interrogate biology. What impressed us about Pluto is how it puts the power of LLMs into the hands of domain expert scientists–biologists, translational researchers, and discovery teams–by giving them an instantly intuitive interface for expressing scientific questions faster and in a way that increases scientific rigor and reproducibility.”
said Dalton Wright, General Partner at Kickstart.
Pluto Biosciences is a cloud-based platform empowering life sciences organisations to visualize and analyze complex biological data sets easily, with no coding required, by uploading raw data from a wide variety of experiment types (qPCR, ELISA, RNA-seq, metabolomics, proteomics, and more) and generate interactive results pages, and share them easily and securely with collaborators.
🧠 KAIST to Develop Korea’s Version of ChatGPT Capable of Autonomous Drug Discovery
South Korea's top science institute, KAIST (The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 한국과학기술원), is developing an advanced AI language model tailored for autonomous drug discovery—often described as Korea’s version of ChatGPT for pharma (KAIST to Develop Korea’s Version of ChatGPT Capable of Autonomous Drug Discovery). Backed by a total investment of 11.5 billion won (approximately 💰 $8.35M), the project will run from May 2025 through December 2030. The initiative aims to foster an innovative AI research ecosystem centered on young researchers and to develop reasoning-based AI agents capable of utilizing biomedical knowledge systems (designed to interpret scientific literature, design molecules, and simulate biological interactions) and autonomously expanding them.
📄 GATC Health Paper Quantifies AI-Driven Capital Efficiencies and Advances Human-Centered Drug Discovery
A newly published paper by GATC Health highlights how AI is not only accelerating discovery but also driving capital efficiency across drug development pipelines (GATC Health Paper Quantifies AI-Driven Capital Efficiencies and Advances Human-Centered Drug Discovery).
GATC Health Corp, a leading tech-bio company leveraging AI to transform drug discovery, has published a new paper titled AI in Drug Development: Advancing Capital Efficiency, Reducing Animal Testing, and Driving Precision Medicine that details how advancements such as GATC's Multiomics Advanced Technology™ (MAT) platform is reshaping pharmaceutical development by improving speed, cost, and accuracy while reducing reliance on animal testing through human-relevant AI models.
Highlights include:
🔴 GATC Health's MAT was validated by University of California, Irvine, with predictions of sensitivity at 8️⃣6️⃣% and specificity at 9️⃣1️⃣%.
🔴 Models of human biological systems can test thousands of drug candidates in silico—achieving results 1,000x faster 🏃 than conventional methods and at dramatically lower cost.
🔴 The platform simulates human biology, enabling accurate predictions without ⛔ animal studies and supporting regulatory shifts like the FDA Modernization Act. AI-driven methods could replace animal testing for up to 38.4 million animals annually.
Recently (March 05, 2025), Lisata Therapeutics and GATC Health partnered to apply AI to pancreatic cancer drug development, aiming to demonstrate AI's transformative potential in oncology (Lisata Therapeutics and GATC Health Consummate First Step Can AI Revolutionize Lisata's Pancreatic Cancer Drug? New GATC Health Partnership Aims to Prove It). Lisata Therapeutics (NASDAQ: LSTA) is a biotech firm specializing in oncology, with a focus on pancreatic cancer, a disease known for its poor prognosis and limited treatment options while GATC Health is leveraging its AI-driven Multiomics Advanced Technology ™, MAT platform, that combines neural networks and ML, to accelerate drug discovery and development. This strategic collaboration will leverage GATC's proprietary MAT™ platform to potentially derisk and accelerate Lisata's drug development process, particularly for certepetide, their Phase 3 candidate for metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.
🧪 Rubedo Life Sciences Announces First Patient Dosed with Lead Drug Candidate RLS-1496 – the First GPX4 Modulator Targeting Pathologic Senescent Cells to Enter Phase 1
Rubedo Life Sciences has dosed the first patient in a Phase 1 trial of RLS-1496, a GPX4 modulator designed to target pathologic senescent 💤😴 cells (Rubedo Life Sciences Announces First Patient Dosed with Lead Drug Candidate RLS-1496, the First GPX4 Modulator Targeting Pathologic Senescent Cells To Enter Phase 1). Back on January 16, 2025 Rubedo Life Sciences announced its clinical development plans for its lead 🦚 candidate RLS-1496, (a first-in-class treatment for inflammatory skin disease).
Therapeutic Mechanism:
Selectively eliminates senescent (“zombie”) cells implicated in chronic inflammation and aging-related diseases.
Unlike senolytics, it modulates GPX4 rather than inducing apoptosis directly—offering potential for improved safety. GPX4 or glutathione peroxidase 4, is a crucial antioxidant enzyme that plays a key role in defending against lipid peroxidation, a process that can damage cell membranes and contribute to various diseases. GPX4 is a lipid-repair enzyme that catalyzes glutathione (GSH), oxidized GSH to glutathione disulfide (GSSG), removes cellular lipid peroxides, lowers lipid ROS accumulation, and protects cells from ferroptosis.
Rubedo Life Sciences has developed its proprietary ALEMBIC™ AI-driven drug discovery platform that identifies novel druggable targets by leveraging (scRNAseq) and other omics data to identify the pathologic senescent cells unique to specific cell populations that emerge with diseases of aging. Moreover, SenTech, its proprietary medicinal chemistry process engineers small molecules with superior safety and selectivity properties over existing drugs. SenTech’s targeting ability is achieved through drug design (including pro-drugs) which combines specific molecular targets with unique metabolic functions.
Apart the RLS-1496 program (for Chronic AD, Chronic Psoriasis, Systemic Sclerosis, Scleroderma), Rubedo is currently working on four more programs: Pulmonary (IPF), Liver (NASH), Neuro Musculoskeletal (Sarcopenia) and Oncology (NSCLC). On April 19, 2024, Rubedo brought in $40M in a series A financing round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Ahren Innovation Capital.
💸 Juvenescence Secures $76M in Series B-1 Financing Led by M42 to Accelerate AI-Driven Drug Development
Juvenescence, a longevity-focused biotech firm, raised $76 million led by M42, a health-tech investment group based in Abu Dhabi (Juvenescence Secures $76M in Series B-1 Financing Led by M42 to Accelerate AI-Driven Drug Development). Juvenescence Limited is a British Virgin Islands-based holding company that invests in human aging and longevity.
Use of Funds:
Expand its portfolio of AI-developed therapeutics targeting aging and age-related diseases.
Advance preclinical and clinical programs including PAI-1 Inhibitor (fibrosis), GDF-15 mAb (muscle wasting), CD38 Inhibitor (rheumatoid arthritis), Ketone Rx (heart failure), and Plasmalogen (alzheimer's disease).
🤖 Insilico Biotech CEO Predicts AI-Designed Drugs May Be Ready by 2030
Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine, predicts that fully AI-designed drugs—from discovery through IND-enabling studies—could reach clinical trials by 2️⃣0️⃣3️⃣0️⃣ (Biotech startup Insilico CEO sees AI drugs may be ready by 2030).
Key Drivers:
Rapid maturation of generative AI platforms for molecule design.
Increased collaboration between AI startups and big pharma.
Regulatory agencies becoming more open to AI-derived evidence.
Progress So Far:
Insilico has already advanced multiple AI-discovered candidates into Phase 1/2 trials. In fact, 1️⃣0️⃣ of its programs have now reached clinical stage.
Insilico’s brand new paper in Nature Communications is all about a novel AI-generated molecule, ISM3312, Insilico Medicine’s covalent 3CL protease inhibitor born from a multi-model generative engine: A novel, covalent broad-spectrum inhibitor targeting human coronavirus Mpro.
You can find
💊 Persist AI Raises $12 Million to Fix Drug Formulation Challenges
Persist AI, an AI startup developing next generation formulation development processes using robotics and AI, has raised $12M in seed funding (Beyond the $12M: Revolutionizing Drug Formulation Development at Persist AI). Persist’s AI platform allows its users tonutilize a toolkit in order to analyze complex formulation data sets, predict formulations to match a Quality target product profile, QTPP, and to generate the protocol for the robotic lab to carry out. Persist’s AI is trained on thousands of data points generated by your high throughput lab. Basically, through their web interface, scientists can choose formulation parameters, and a robotic lab will build and test the formulations. All data is available through the cloud 🌫️☁️ portal.
Once the AI models predict a set of formulations, Persist's Cloud Lab enables scientists to test the formulation by remotely controlling the robotic lab. With a combination of miniaturization and seamless automation of formulation testing instruments, Persist's technology leads to an unprecedented speed advantage in drug development. Traditional testing instruments often require large volumes of liquid and significant amounts of formulation material per test. As an example, a standard dissolution testing apparatus requires 1000 mL of liquid and several grams of formulation. In contrast, Persist's miniaturized systems can deliver results with just 1 mL of liquid and a few milligrams of material. This breakthrough not only conserves valuable drugs but also enables higher throughput testing.
The funding round was led by Spero Ventures with participation from MBX Capital, Shimadzu Future Innovation Fund managed by Global Brain Corporation, Eli Lilly & Company, SignalFire, Ford Street Capital, Purdue Ventures, Good AI Capital, Cartography Capital, Asymmetry Ventures, and existing investors 2048 Ventures, Innospark, and YCombinator.
🗯️ "Every drug that reaches the market depends on an optimal formulation. While the industry has heavily invested in AI and predictive tools across the drug development pipeline, formulation has remained a blind spot—until now. Persist dramatically reduces both the time and cost at every stage of development, ultimately lowering the hurdle for investment in next-generation therapeutics like long-acting injectables."
said Sara Eshelman, General Partner at Spero Ventures.
📰 Schrödinger to Cut 7% of Workforce
Schrödinger plans to cut ✂️ its full-time workforce by about 7%⬇️ as it looks to cut costs.
💉 Biostate AI Lands $12M Series A
AI and RNA sequencing firm Biostate AI raised $12M in a Series A funding round led by Accel. The round also saw participation from Gaingels, Mana Ventures, InfoEdge Ventures, as well as returning backers Matter Venture Partners, Vision Plus Capital, and Catapult Ventures (RNA sequencing startup Biostate AI raises $12M in Series A funding led by Accel). The AI startup will use the fresh capital to expand access to integrated precision medicine, starting with RNA sequencing (RNAseq) services for US-based molecular research.
Biostate.AI's core mission is to combine cutting-edge RNA sequencing technology (as well as other omics tech) with artificial intelligence. They are building what is rapidly becoming the world’s largest 🦣 RNAseq database by dramatically reducing ⬇️ sequencing costs through their proprietary technologies. Their assays make RNAseq and other omics accessible at unprecedented scale, while their AI models extract meaning from this massive influx of data.
These foundation models, trained on diverse RNA expression profiles, captures the dynamic nature of biology, including diseases and therapies, in ways genomics or other molecules cannot:
📌 Meet OmicsWeb: Omics Data, AI Ready: OmicsWeb enables biological research across the globe by providing a comprehensive platform for omics data management and analysis, harnessing unique insights from large-scale projects that Biostate is conducting worldwide. They are homogenizing the way omics data can be stored along with clinical labels in a de-identified fashion that is compliant across multiple jurisdictions while making it extremely easy to perform standard data analysis as well as custom data analysis using their Copilot platform.
📌 Prognosis AI: Predicting Disease Outcomes with Biobase: Prognosis AI represents a breakthrough approach to disease prediction and therapy selection using transcriptomic data. Built on Biostate’s Biobase foundation model—which has been pre-trained on massive unlabeled RNA datasets—Prognosis AI makes powerful predictions with remarkably small sets of labeled clinical samples.
📉 Biotech Stocks Are Tumbling — But The Top 5 Are Standouts
Despite a broad downturn in the NASDAQ Biotech Index (NBI) and broader equities market, five biotech stocks are outperforming, driven by strong clinical catalysts, or innovative pipeline assets (Biotech Stocks Are Tumbling — But The Top 5 Are Standouts).
🔝 Top 5 Standout Biotechs (April 2025):
Exelixis (EXEL): The company has made a name for itself as a cancer treatment specialist. It sells ✳️ Cabometyx, a treatment for several forms of kidney, liver and thyroid cancer. The company's ✳️ Cometriq treats thyroid cancer.
Catalyst Pharmaceuticals (CPRX): Catalyst Pharmaceuticals licenses approved or soon-to-be approved treatments for rare diseases and diseases of the central nervous system. The company has three products: ✳️ Firdapse treats a neuromuscular condition that often affects small cell lung cancer patients; ✳️ Fycompa is a seizure treatment; and Catalyst also has a Duchenne muscular dystrophy drug called ✳️ Agamree.
CorMedix (CRMD): The company's lead product, ✳️ DefenCath, was approved in November 2023 and launched for patients in hospitals in July 2024. DefenCath is a combination of drugs called taurolidine and heparin to reduce the risk of catheter-related bloodstream infections in kidney failure patients receiving chronic dialysis through a central venous catheter.
TG Therapeutics (TGTX): TG Therapeutics is trying to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis. The company's drug, ✳️ Briumvi, starts with two infusions two weeks apart. Then, patients receive an hourlong infusion every six months.
Rigel Therapeutics (RIGL): The company sells three drugs. ✳️ Tavalisse treats chronic immune thrombocytopenia in adults. In this condition, the body mistakenly attacks and destroys the platelets. This leads to an increased risk of bleeding, bruising and other symptoms. Rigel also has ✳️ Rezlidhia, a leukemia drug, and ✳️ Gavreto, which treats lung and thyroid cancers.
Great work
Very cool news compilation!