Research & Development World

Over the past few years, consulting firms and vendors have urged life science organizations to reinvent their operations with generative AI and, more recently, with semi-autonomous agents. A February 2026 Pharmaphorum analysis by NVIDIA’s David Ruau predicted that AI scientists would become “essential collaborators” embedded across the research lifecycle as 2026 progresses. The transition remains…

The modern pharmaceutical industry is navigating an era of rapid scientific progress, yet it remains constrained by a fundamentally inefficient development pipeline. Bringing a single new drug to market takes an average of 12 years and costs nearly $3 billion.1 Roughly 90% of drug candidates that enter clinical trials fail to achieve regulatory approval,2 often… The post Accelerating drug discove…

In the span of several weeks this spring, every major frontier AI lab and cloud hyperscaler formally declared pharma R&D a core vertical. In April, OpenAI launched GPT-Rosalind, its frontier reasoning model series built for life sciences research, biology, and drug discovery. The ChatGPT developer also announced a significant partnership with Novo Nordisk that same… The post AI co-scientist start…

Beckman Coulter Life Sciences has announced the commercial release of the Echo 650 Plus Series acoustic liquid handlers. The launch brings redesigned electronics, a new transducer architecture, and a 54% reduction in power consumption compared to legacy Echo instruments. According to Beckman Coulter, the core is a next-generation transducer equipped with a durable titanium lens.… The post Beckman…

The resolution revolution in cryo-electron microscopy had reached broad recognition by 2015, when Nature Methods hailed it the method of the year and declared an end to “blob-ology,” a term structural biologist Helen Saibil recalls crystallographers once used to dismiss EM’s then low-resolution imaging. In the decade since, pharma companies have moved from cautious exploration… The post Thermo Fi…

Longevity medicine is gradually going mainstream in pharma. In April, Insilco Medicine unveiled what it termed the industry’s first longevity board, a panel aimed at accelerating AI-driven aging research into new therapies. Chairing the board is Eli Lilly molecular discovery executive Andrew Adams, alongside Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, Medici Therapeutics CEO Denitsa Milanova, and Insilico… Th…

FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics opened a new iPSC manufacturing facility in Madison on May 19, expanding the company’s capacity to produce human cells for drug discovery, toxicity testing, stem cell banking and cell therapy development. The 175,000-square-foot campus, part of a $200 million strategic investment announced in 2023, includes iPSC cGMP manufacturing, three cleanroom suites, process… The p…

Google’s Gemini 3 triggered a Code Red at OpenAI last December and briefly seized the frontier narrative. Roughly half a year later, the AI model race had mostly become a two-company contest between Anthropic and OpenAI with Claude and GPT trading the top spots on independent leaderboards. Meanwhile, Google’s developer tools steadily lost ground to… The post Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash scores withi…

Anthropic hired Andrej Karpathy to its pretraining team on Tuesday and is winding down Stainless, the $300 million SDK startup it also acquired recently. That latter move cuts off tooling that rivals OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare relied on. Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, served as director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, and in… The post Why Anthropic hired OpenAI co-fou…

The market for industrial robot installations has never been worth more, even as North American robot orders remained flat in early 2026. Industrial robot installations alone hit a record $16.7 billion in market value in 2024, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with Asia (74% of deployments) and China in particular driving the totals.… The post The 2 a.m. problem: A Jabil exec…

Instead of Spy vs. Spy, the cybersecurity world is quickly becoming AI vs. AI. Anthropic is positioning its gated Claude Mythos Preview model as offering a “striking leap” in many evaluation benchmarks over its predecessor, which at the time of launch was Opus 4.6. Most recently, Cloudflare Chief Security Officer Grant Bourzikas reported that Mythos… The post Post-Mythos, defenders have months, n…

RLWRLD, a Seoul-founded startup backed by KAIST researchers, is making a simple pitch across manufacturing, logistics and hospitality: let us replace human hands with robot ones. At the company’s “Dexterity Night” launch event in San Francisco, CEO Junghee Ryu said his team has met with more than 200 large companies and heard the same thing… The post NVIDIA-backed robotics startup RLWRLD targets …

Stanford researchers have announced that they have compressed a time-intensive protein building and testing process to 24 hours. Published in Molecular Systems Biology, the paper describes a method known as MIDAS (Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening) that differs from traditional protein engineering, which requires cloning genes into circular plasmids, growing them in bacteria or yeas…

Companies from Palantir to Salesforce to Veeva are racing to speed up regulatory workflows with AI agents, as is a wave of startups targeting everything from clinical document generation to pharmacovigilance case processing. Meanwhile, many large pharmas are pursuing a build-and-compose strategy of their own, stitching AI into existing regulatory systems, validated workflows and company-specific……

Say you are in the market for form-fitted clothing for a special event. Off the rack won’t do, and your tailoring requests are demanding: structural alterations, unusual fabrics, tight deadline. Some tailors might balk at the request. Others might take your measurements, feed them into the system and tell you the job can’t be done.… The post Why Twist Bioscience’s complex genes offering is a bet …

At Sandia National Laboratories, inspecting ceramic components destined for nuclear deterrence applications traditionally meant lots of manual work. Inspectors would sit at a microscope for up to an hour per part where they would scan every surface for hairline cracks, chips and voids that could compromise performance. Training a single operator on the manual process… The post Sandia turns to lig…

Several of the highest-profile AI-biology startups have made openness part of their strategy. Profluent, an Emeryville-based protein design company, open-sourced OpenCRISPR-1, which it calls the first AI-created gene editor to successfully modify human DNA, and says tens of thousands of researchers have accessed it since 2024. Xaira Therapeutics, co-founded by Nobel laureate David Baker with… The…

The National Science Foundation is channeling $1.5 billion over the next decade into independent research teams. Focus areas include quantum systems and next-generation scientific instruments. The news comes even as the agency navigates proposed budget cuts that would slash its funding by more than half and a grant pipeline that has slowed dramatically under the… The post NSF bets $1.5B on X-Labs…

PacBio’s HiFi Solves Sub-fertility Consortium published a preprint of its first major study. The study focused on couples with unexplained subfertility or recurrent pregnancy loss after standard clinical evaluation had ruled out known causes. Subfertility affects approximately one in six couples globally. Genetic evaluation often remains fragmented, requiring multiple sequential tests over months…

Federal funding cuts are affecting scientists across the country. In academia, cuts are causing budget reductions, termination of ongoing research and disruption to the talent pipeline.  Universities are facing a 15% cap on facilities and administrative cost reimbursements. Usually, the government reimburses universities for about 60% of these indirect costs. Now, universities like UConn expect… …