Rowan Walrath

How Nobel-winning algorithms are fueling biotech today

BARDA awards 3 firms $72 million for bird flu vaccines

Aktis Oncology, a radiopharmaceutical firm that launched in 2021, has raised $175 million in a series B financing round co-led by RA Capital Management, RTW Investments, and Janus Henderson Investors.

Two start-ups have launched to develop next-generation drugs using small interfering RNA (siRNA) to silence genes. The first, Judo Bio, is a spin-off of the venture capital firm Atlas Venture. The company spent about 3 years in stealth while designing a drug candidate that combines a ligand with siRNA that should silence messenger RNA (mRNA) and, in turn, reduce the number of certain solute carrier proteins that are involved in disease. While siRNA is a proven therapeutic approach, getting it to the right cell types is challenging. The kidney is a “very complex tissue,” says Chief Scientific Officer Alfica Sehgal, a former head scientist at RNA biotech firms Camp4 Therapeutics and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. The organ consists of multiple tissue types, making specificity difficult. The glomerulus, a network of blood vessels in the kidney, also filters out molecules by size; it excretes siRNA by default. “It's not an easy bean to

Judo Bio and City Therapeutics both want to go after tricky tissues Two start-ups have launched to develop next-generation drugs using small interfering RNA (siRNA) to silence genes.

Lundbeck agrees to buy neuroscience firm

When Schrödinger launched more than 30 years ago, computational biology was a nascent technology. Schrödinger, a pioneer in the field, relied heavily on the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a collection of solved protein structures that got its start in the 1970s. “Getting a structure in the lab used to be—and still is—difficult,” says Karen Akinsanya, Schrödinger's president of therapeutics R&D. Back then, a single protein structure would potentially comprise a person's entire PhD or postdoctoral research, taking “years of work,” she says. The entire field of structure-based drug design took a giant leap forward with the advent of AlphaFold, the protein prediction software that launched in 2020 and this month became a Nobel Prize–winning technology . AlphaFold, which is owned by Google's DeepMind and was built on the PDB and other protein sequence databases, has used a neural network to predict the structures of now millions of proteins. Schrödinger and

Start-up emerges from stealth with $20 million to develop the new approach

Sanofi and the nuclear corporation Orano have agreed to coinvest in a new Orano subsidiary that will develop radioligands based on lead-212 α-emitting isotopes.

Merck & Co. has bought a Yale University spinout called Modifi Biosciences for $30 million up front and the potential for more than $1.3 billion in milestone payments.