ARPA-H frames $125 million RNA manufacturing network as a domestic foundation
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health is directing $125 million toward building a distributed network to manufacture personalized RNA drugs.
News
Caribou halts clinical trials and cuts staff as shares drop over 60%
Caribou Biosciences announced it is halting clinical development of its two allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies, conducting a substantial workforce reduction, and evaluating strategic alternatives.
FDA approves Asahi Kasei's oral HSV drug pritelivir for resistant infections
The FDA cleared Hovilpri (pritelivir), an oral viral helicase-primase inhibitor, to treat refractory mucocutaneous herpes simplex virus infections in immunocompromised adults failing standard nucleoside therapies.
Reuters, also reported by Endpoints News (subscription required)Fierce PharmaMirum plans FDA filing after Livmarli hits endpoint in Phase 3 itching trial
Mirum Pharmaceuticals reported that Livmarli met its primary endpoint in a Phase 3 study, significantly reducing severe pruritus in patients with rare liver disease.
Fierce Pharma, also reported by Endpoints News (subscription required)Merck reveals eye complications and dropouts in late-stage eye drug trial
Detailed Phase 3 data for Merck's diabetic macular edema candidate remigromig showed adverse events related to proliferative diabetic retinopathy in 6.7% and 6.1% of patients depending on the dose, compared to 0.9% for Lucentis.
BioPharma Dive, also reported by Fierce BiotechAspen files for Nasdaq listing to fund cell therapy for Parkinson's disease
Aspen Neuroscience has filed for an initial public offering to advance its autologous cell therapy, which transforms skin cells into dopamine-producing neurons for surgical implantation.
BioPharma Dive, also reported by Fierce BiotechTortugas Neuroscience reports Phase 2 win for licensed schizophrenia pill
Partner Hansoh Pharma reported that obuprazine significantly cut schizophrenia symptoms compared to placebo across five doses in a Phase 2b trial of 363 adults in China.
FDA accepts Roche's eye drug vamikibart for review after mixed Phase 3 results
The FDA will review Roche's intravitreal IL-6 inhibitor vamikibart for uveitic macular edema, setting an action date of July 2027.
Over $500 billion in prescription drug sales face patent expiries by 2032
More than $500 billion in global prescription sales are vulnerable to generic and biosimilar rivals between 2026 and 2032, according to Evaluate forecasting data reported by BioPharma Dive.
DeepMind watermarks AI-designed proteins without reducing target binding
Google DeepMind and Adaptyv Bio published a study in Nature demonstrating SynthIDBio, a watermarking method that embeds identifiable origin tags into AI-generated protein sequences and structures.
Bristol Myers Squibb reports Phase 3 wins in lung fibrosis and neuroendocrine tumors
Bristol Myers Squibb announced that both its oral LPA1 blocker admilparant in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and its targeted radiotherapy RYZ101 in neuroendocrine tumors met their primary endpoints in late-stage trials.
Fierce Biotech, also reported by Endpoints News (subscription required)BioPharma Dive
Publications
Interpretable machine learning designs degradable lipids for liver mRNA delivery
Researchers combined interpretable machine learning with modular chemistry to screen degradable ionizable lipids, picking out a lead candidate that successfully delivered mRNA to the liver in mice.
Preprints
Dynamic metabolic modeling predicts fecal transplant engraftment and resistance to C. difficile
Researchers built muODE, an automated computational framework that converts reconstructed bacterial genomes into dynamic metabolic simulations integrated with ecological factors such as pH, antibiotic levels, and bile-acid transformations.
GPU tensor reformulations accelerate structural docking analysis in HADDOCK3
Developers restructured the pairwise structural comparison algorithms in the macromolecular docking suite HADDOCK3 into continuous GPU tensor operations.
Single-cell foundation models beat simple baselines only when labeled cells are scarce
Benchmarking cell representations from four single-cell foundation models across 868 disease-prediction tasks and 65 cell-type datasets showed that standard log-normalized gene counts match or outperform the best model, TranscriptFormer-Sapiens, when full training data is available.
Genomic language model weaves reference coordinates into DNA sequence modeling
Researchers introduced USM-AA, a genomic foundation model that integrates reference genome coordinates directly into sequence representations.
Machine learning picks better target sites for programmable RNA sensors
Computational biologists developed DeSTAR, a machine-learning model that ranks target sites on RNA transcripts to improve the performance of toehold-switch RNA sensors.
Statistical model maps full amino acid flexibility beyond classical Ramachandran plots
Researchers modeled the complete torsional angles of all 20 amino acids and 400 amino-acid pairs across up to 14 dimensions, conditioning the continuous distributions on secondary structure elements.
Deep learning toolkit decodes raw nanopore signals from native tRNA
Computational biologists built tRNAZAP, a transformer-based toolkit that directly analyzes raw ionic current signals from nanopore sequencers to read short, heavily modified transfer RNA molecules.
General AI models reason through protein mutations without specialist tools
Researchers benchmarked whether general large language models can predict mutation effects directly from raw three-dimensional atomic coordinates without relying on dedicated molecular energy calculators.
Single-cell foundation models often perform better using middle layers than final outputs
Benchmarking four major single-cell foundation models across cell-type and perturbation tasks revealed that intermediate layers frequently match or outperform the final layer representations standardly used in downstream biology.
AI designs protein structures directly from text descriptions
Researchers built Prompteina, an all-atom generative model that creates protein structures from written prompts rather than specialized property encodings.