Andrii Buvailo, PhD

After securing $40 million in August 2024, Noetik—an AI-native biotechnology company—announced in a recently released technical report the launch of OCTO-VirtualCell, a next-generation AI model designed to reveal how cells behave in both healthy and disease contexts. Noetik leverages self-supervised machine learning and high-throughput spatial data to advance precision therapies.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), a chronic and debilitating autoimmune disorder that includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, impacts millions of lives globally. Characterized by chronic gut inflammation, intestinal barrier dysfunction, and increased risk of colitis-associated cancer, IBD remains an unmet clinical challenge. Current treatments, largely focused on anti-inflammatory drugs, offer symptomatic relief but fail to address epithelial barrier damage—a core issue in IBD progression. As a result, patients face the threat of disease recurrence, prolonged dependence on medications, and increased risk of colorectal cancer.

Insilico Medicine, a biotechnology company that developed foundational artificial intelligence (AI) in drug discovery platform, recently reported promising results from a Phase IIa clinical trial of its experimental drug ISM001-055, developed specifically to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). The trial results showed that the drug, designed entirely using generative AI, could improve lung function in patients over just 12 weeks, offering a potential new therapeutic option for those battling this life-threatening disease.

Over the past decade, aging research has transitioned from foundational biological studies, including a landmark introduction of 9 hallmarks of aging back in 2013 and its expanded version of 12 hallmarks in 2023, to a highly technical, multidisciplinary field. This transformation has been driven by a lot of advances in biology, but also technological innovations, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI), which enabled more sophisticated biomarker discovery, and clinical interventions.

MEDSIR (Medica Scientia Innovation Research) is an international company, based in Barcelona and New Jersey, specializing in the design and management of innovative oncology clinical trials. Since its founding in 2012, MEDSIR has built a reputation for developing adaptive and precision-medicine-based trial designs, such as the PHERGain trial, which explores chemotherapy-free approaches for HER2-positive breast cancer. The company operates globally, leveraging a network of research sites and employing cutting-edge technologies, including AI, to optimize trial outcomes and reduce the burden on patients . 

A recent study conducted by Indivumed Therapeutics highlights a crucial, yet often overlooked, factor in cancer research: the cold ischemia time (CIT), or the time it takes to preserve tumor tissues after surgical removal. This seemingly technical detail—whether tissue samples are snap-frozen within 10 minutes or after a longer delay—can profoundly alter the molecular characteristics of the samples, which in turn impacts the discovery of new cancer drug targets.

The findings, published in Cell Death & Disease, reveal that even short delays in preservation can lead to significant shifts in gene expression and protein activity, complicating efforts to accurately identify novel drug targets. This research underscores the importance of rapid tissue handling protocols for ensuring the reliability of molecular data, a critical step in precision oncology.

Immunai, a New York-based AI biotech company, has entered a multi-year collaboration with AstraZeneca to optimize oncology clinical trials. This partnership will use Immunai’s proprietary AMICA platform and Immunodynamics Engine (IDE)—technologies combining multi-omic single-cell data and advanced AI models of the immune system—to improve trial design and clinical decision-making.

What does aging have in common with pathogens like bacteria and viruses? And how does the quest to tackle antimicrobial drug resistance -- an alarmingly growing healthcare crisis in its own right -- may also be a potential game changer for aging research?

Foundation models represent a new paradigm in artificial intelligence (AI), revolutionizing how machine learning models are developed and deployed. As these models grow increasingly capable, they become useful for applications across a wide range of economic functions and industries, including biotech. Foundation models are a class of large-scale machine learning models, typically based on deep learning architectures such as transformers, that are trained on massive datasets encompassing diverse types of data. The most prominent examples of general-purpose foundation models are the GPT-3 and GPT-4 models, which form the basis of ChatGPT, and BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. These are gigantic models trained on enormous volumes of data, often in a self-supervised or unsupervised manner (without the need for labeled data).

Their scalability in terms of both model size and data volume enables them to capture intricate patterns and dependencies within the data. The pre-training phase of foundation models imparts them with a broad knowledge base, making them highly efficient in few-shot or zero-shot learning scenarios where minimal labeled data is available for specific tasks.

This approach demonstrates their high versatility and transfer learning capabilities, adapting to the nuances of particular challenges through additional training.

Below we summarized a number of companies building domain-specific foundation models for biology research and related areas, like chemistry.

Roche has announced an expansion of its Digital Pathology Open Environment, integrating over 20 artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms from eight new collaborators into its navify® Digital Pathology platform. This move is aimed at improving cancer diagnosis by using AI-driven image analysis tools that support pathologists in analyzing tissue samples more accurately, particularly for cancer-related diagnostics and research. The expansion aligns with Roche’s strategy to leverage its control over upstream hardware and software, offering a platform that facilitates integration with third-party AI tools.