Background: The increasing reliance on patient portals for electronic health records has widened the digital health care access gap, particularly among low-income and Medicaid-insured populations. However, resources exist to assist low-income patients with portal enrollment; in obtaining a free smartphone; and, in New York, in obtaining low-cost internet. Automated bidirectional SMS text messaging offers a scalable and cost-effective strategy for identifying low-income patients’ digital health needs and eligibility for resources by using screening questions and providing tailored information on how to access available resources. Objective: This study aimed to increase portal access among low-income patients using automated bidirectional SMS text messaging and assess its feasibility and acceptability. Methods: This quality improvement initiative involved sending automated, bidirectional SMS text messages in English to 12,381 Medicaid-insured and/or low-income patients from a primary care practice. Messages assessed patients’ digital health needs and provided adaptive, personalized resources and assistance for enrolling in the patient portal and for accessing digital technology. We assessed response rates and follow-up portal enrollment rates. We surveyed participants regarding the acceptability, appropriateness, and usability of the SMS text messaging intervention, as well as their subsequent use of the patient portal. We performed descriptive statistics and a binomial probability test. Results: In total, 9.2% (1140/12,381) of patients responded to the SMS text messages, with 3.9% (481/12,381) opting out and 5.3% (659/12,381) actively engaging. Among respondents, 71.1% (469/659) completed the follow-up survey. Respondents were predominantly female (336/469, 71.6%), with ages ranging from 18 to 65 years or older. Most respondents rated the message’s clarity (420/469, 89.6%), its usefulness (400/469, 85.2%), and the demonstration of care by their health team (350/469, 74.6%) favorably. Concerns regarding privacy (61/469, 13%) and trustworthiness (71/469, 15%) were noted. Notably, 71% of initially unenrolled patients activated their patient portals after the intervention (=.007), exceeding the hypothesized expectations. Conclusions: Automated bidirectional SMS text messaging had mixed effects on promoting patient portal use among low-income patients. Response rates to SMS text messages were low when delivered from an unknown phone number. Among responders, most reported that these messages were useful and that they would recommend them to others. Research is needed to determine optimal strategies for introducing the program and vendor phone numbers to patients to improve engagement.
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Curiosity in a Novel Virtual Reality Scenario and Its Association With Symptoms of Depression: Observational Pilot Investigation
Background: Curiosity plays a fundamental role in human learning, development, and motivation, and emerging evidence suggests that reduced curiosity is linked to poorer mental health outcomes, including depressive symptoms (DS). However, to date, the majority of curiosity research relies on self-report assessments and thus risks biased reporting. Virtual reality (VR), a novel tool increasingly used within mental health research and treatment, might represent a potent tool for offering ecologically valid insights into curiosity-driven behaviors while circumventing issues related to self-report assessments, including demand characteristics and recall bias. Objective: The study aimed to enhance the assessment of curiosity by using a novel VR environment and to examine its relevance to DS. Specifically, we tested 2 hypotheses using a novel VR environment: first, that curiosity, as assessed through spontaneous exploratory interactions and behaviors in VR, positively correlates with self-reported curiosity, and second, that VR-based curiosity is inversely associated with DS. Methods: This exploratory study used an observational design that included 100 volunteers. All participants completed self-reported assessments of DS and curiosity before engaging in a novel VR scenario. Although progression in the virtual environment required solving cognitive tasks, these were embedded as structural elements rather than framed as the primary objective. Instead, participants’ free explorations and interactions with objects formed the basis for the 4 curiosity metrics used in this study. After VR exposure, participants completed a questionnaire assessing cybersickness symptoms. Results: Hypothesis 1 was not supported, as only one curiosity metric, namely object interactions, was positively associated with one aspect of curiosity relating to motivation to seek new knowledge and experiences. Further, diminishing significance after correction for multiple testing warranted caution. Results relating to hypothesis 2 indicated partial support, in that object interaction was significantly associated with DS while controlling for age, sex, and cybersickness levels. Sensitivity analyses showed no associations between object interactions and self-reported anxiety and stress symptoms. Conclusions: VR may be a potent tool for assessing exploratory behaviors in a controlled, yet ecologically valid, environment that avoids issues related to self-report. However, whether such motivations translate to established curiosity constructs warrants further research. This study also provided preliminary insights into how assessing exploratory interactions in VR may be a promising avenue that could enhance the understanding of the etiology and assessment of DS—particularly its early stages.
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TRACS Enables Strain-Level Tracking of Microbial Transmission
Tracking microbes is challenging, particularly when there are coexisting strains of the same species within metagenomic data. However, overcoming that challenge is important for inferring transmission of both pathogenic and commensal microbes.
A new tool, called TRAnsmision Clustering of Strains (TRACS), distinguishes between closely related bacterial strains. The “highly accurate algorithm” can be used for “estimating genetic distances between strains at the level of individual single nucleotide polymorphisms, which is robust to intra-species diversity within the host.”
Researchers used the TRACS tool to map the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Plasmodium falciparum (the causative agent of malaria) across different populations. The tool may play an important role in infection prevention, outbreak response, and the development of treatments designed to help the human microbiome fight infection. They note that this tool can be used across microbial kingdoms to uncover strain dynamics.
“Traditionally, this has been very difficult for us to achieve, yet it is incredibly important to know, as people can carry several slightly different versions or strains of the same species at once, which makes it challenging to understand how microbes move between individuals,” notes Gerry Tonkin-Hill, PhD, group leader at the the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the Peter Doherty Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “Using this new technology, we can now overcome this challenge and gain a clearer picture of how microbes are shared between people. This will give us a better understanding of how microbes spread to help us prevent infection in vulnerable populations, like our cancer patients.”
This work is published in Nature Microbiology in the paper, “Strain-level transmission inference across multi-kingdom metagenomic data using TRACS.”
Being able to track the spread of pathogens using genomics has become a major tool in public health and can help inform new ways to prevent transmission. Additionally, it can help understand more about how lifestyle and environmental factors are involved in the transmission of these pathogens, and their role in the microbiome.
Currently, genomic tools used to track multiple bacterial species do not have the speed and flexibility required for routine public health monitoring and can struggle to distinguish between samples transmitted recently and those transmitted years ago. Furthermore, it can be difficult to continuously add in new samples, making real-time surveillance difficult.
The TRACS algorithm identifies and analyzes Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) to estimate how closely related the pathogens are, and if they are likely to have recently been transmitted. This approach allows for the continuous integration of new samples, making it an ideal tool for accurately identifying transmission networks and ruling out transmission events in ongoing public health applications.
In this new study, the team used TRACS to map pathogen transmission networks across three different populations, all of which had different genomic data. They applied it to SARS-CoV-2 data from U.K. hospitals, deep population sequencing data of Streptococcus pneumoniae and single-cell genome sequencing data from malaria patients infected with Plasmodium falciparum. They found that the tool was able to identify different pathogens in one sample and infer where these were each transmitted.
They also used TRACS to study how microbes are passed from mothers to infants and found that one beneficial bacterium, Bifidobacterium breve, persisted in infants longer than previously recognized, something that previous methods have missed.
More superficially, the authors note that “applying TRACS to gut metagenomic samples from a mother–infant cohort revealed species-specific transmission rates and identified increased the persistence of Bifidobacterium breve in infants, a finding previously missed owing to the presence of multiple strains.”
“This research could support the development of new treatments that use beneficial microbes to improve health,” notes Trevor Lawley, PhD, group leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. “By understanding exactly how microbes move between people and which of them are more likely to thrive in their microbiome, we could design better ways to increase helpful gut microbes and investigate whether there are ways to use these to help prevent infections, opening the door to safer healthcare environments and new microbiome-based therapies.”
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Natural Compounds in Cranberry Juice May Enhance Antibiotic Treatment of UTIs
Researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montreal have found that compounds in cranberry juice may enhance the effectiveness of a commonly used antibiotic for urinary tract infections (UTIs) by altering how bacteria take up the drug. The findings, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, show that cranberry juice increased the activity of fosfomycin against uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) in laboratory testing and reduced the emergence antibiotic resistance mutations in 72% of the E. coli strains studied.
While the findings are encouraging, the researchers noted that the work didn’t show whether consumption of cranberry juice would have the same effects as those shown in the lab. “We don’t know if the metabolites will reach the infection,” said lead author Eric Déziel, PhD, a professor at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique. “But if they could, then juice may increase the efficacy of antibiotic treatment.”
UTIs are most often caused by UPEC, which accounts for the majority of community-acquired infections and a substantial proportion of catheter-associated infections. Standard treatments include antibiotics such as trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, nitrofurantoin, and fosfomycin. While fosfomycin is a recommended first-line therapy because of its broad activity and low resistance rates, past studies have shown that some resistant variants can emerge through mutations that influence bacterial transport systems.
Cranberry products have long been associated with UTI prevention. Earlier theories surmised this was due to fruit’s acidity. Subsequent research, however, has identified specific compounds, including proanthocyanidins and fructose, that interfere with the ability of bacterial to attach to cells lining the urinary tract.
Déziel said that cranberry juice has a long history as folk remedy for preventing and treating urinary tract infections. It was the recent finding of the anti-adhesive properties that prompted further investigation into whether cranberry could influence antibiotic performance.
To test this, the research team exposed 32 clinical isolates of UPEC to cranberry juice in combination with fosfomycin under controlled laboratory conditions. The results showed that in 72% of the strains tested, cranberry juice increased the antibiotic’s inhibitory activity. At the same time, the frequency of spontaneous mutations conferring resistance dropped substantially, in some cases by several orders of magnitude.
The effects of the cranberry juice seems to involve changes in how bacterial cells regulate the uptake of sugars and, by extension, the antibiotic since fosfomycin enters bacterial cells through carbohydrate transport systems, primarily the GlpT and UhpT pathways. Resistance often arises when mutations reduce the activity of these transporters, which then limits the drug entering cells.
Specifically, cranberry juice reduced expression of the GlpT transporter while maintaining or promoting activity through the UhpT system. This shift allowed fosfomycin into the bacterial cell even as other pathways were downregulated. Reporter assays showed that this change sustained antibiotic uptake, while genomic sequencing revealed distinct mutation patterns depending on whether cranberry juice was present.
While the researchers were able to characterize the activity related to the presence of cranberry juice, the compounds responsible for this effect have not been fully identified. Déziel noted that “something in the cranberry juice” induces bacteria to increase uptake through one of these channels, leading to greater absorption of fosfomycin. Previous research has pointed to cranberry-derived molecules that interact with bacterial communication and adherence systems, but their role in modulating antibiotic transport has not been identified.
The study builds on earlier work from Déziel’s lab showing that cranberry extracts can act synergistically with antibiotics. The current research showed that this is also the case with cranberry juice itself. The hope is that simply consuming cranberry juice could produce the same effects as the extracts studied previously.
Despite the promising laboratory data, the researchers said that the findings cannot yet be translated to the clinic. It is still unclear whether the active compounds in cranberry juice are found at the needed concentrations in the urinary tract after consumption, or how much juice would be required to produce a measurable effect.
Future research will seek to identify the specific compounds responsible for the effects shown in this study, determine how they behave in vivo, and assess whether they can be incorporated into treatment strategies.
The post Natural Compounds in Cranberry Juice May Enhance Antibiotic Treatment of UTIs appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
Breast Cancer Prevention Drug Endoxifen Shows Promise at Low Doses
A lower-dose alternative to tamoxifen may offer a safer path to breast cancer prevention, according to new research from Karolinska Institutet. The study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, suggests that endoxifen, the most active metabolite of tamoxifen, can reduce mammographic breast density to a similar extent while causing fewer side effects, a balance that has long been difficult to achieve in preventive treatment.
A long-standing trade-off in prevention
Tamoxifen has long been a cornerstone of breast cancer therapy and prevention. It is widely used to reduce recurrence in patients and is also approved for women at increased risk of developing the disease. Yet despite its proven efficacy, its use in prevention has been limited.
Many patients discontinue treatment because of side effects, particularly symptoms resembling menopause such as hot flushes and night sweats. These challenges have highlighted a persistent problem in preventive medicine: therapies can be effective, but if they are not tolerable, adherence—and therefore real-world benefit—remains low.
A more direct and potentially precise approach
Endoxifen offers a different strategy. As the active form of tamoxifen produced in the body, it acts directly on estrogen receptors without requiring metabolic conversion. This makes its effects more predictable and may reduce variability between patients.
It also raises an important question: if endoxifen is the molecule responsible for tamoxifen’s therapeutic effect, could it be used at lower doses to achieve the same benefit with fewer side effects?
Strong biological effects at low doses
To test this idea, researchers administered low daily doses of endoxifen to healthy premenopausal women and monitored changes in mammographic breast density over six months.
Breast density is an established risk factor for cancer and is increasingly used as a marker of response to preventive therapy. Higher density is associated with increased risk, while reductions during treatment suggest a beneficial biological effect.
The results were notable. Even at very low doses, endoxifen significantly reduced breast density. A daily dose of one milligram led to a reduction of around 19 percent, while two milligrams achieved a reduction of approximately 26 percent. These effects are comparable to those typically seen with standard-dose tamoxifen, despite using a fraction of the dose.
Improved tolerability at lower doses
Equally important was how patients tolerated the treatment. While the higher dose of endoxifen was associated with an increase in menopausal symptoms, the lower dose showed a safety profile similar to placebo.
“Our results suggest that a lower dose may be sufficient to affect breast density, whilst also appearing to be better tolerated,” said Mattias Hammarström, head of operations KARMA project at the Karolinska Institute and co-author of the study
This finding is particularly significant because tolerability is one of the main barriers to preventive therapy. A drug that maintains efficacy while minimizing side effects could substantially improve adherence and expand the use of preventive strategies.
Rethinking dosing in preventive therapy
The study highlights a broader shift toward precision dosing, finding the minimum effective dose rather than relying on traditional high-dose approaches.
In this case, the data suggest that maximal biological effect may be achieved at relatively low levels of drug exposure. Increasing the dose further may not provide additional benefit but can increase the likelihood of adverse effects.
This principle has important implications not only for breast cancer prevention but also for other areas of medicine, where balancing efficacy and tolerability is critical.
Implications for clinical practice
If confirmed in larger studies, low-dose endoxifen could become an attractive option for women at increased risk of breast cancer who are currently reluctant to use tamoxifen.
By offering a similar reduction in breast density with fewer side effects, it may lower the threshold for initiating preventive treatment and improve long-term adherence.
However, it is important to note that reductions in breast density do not directly prove a reduction in cancer risk. Longer-term studies will be needed to determine whether these biological changes translate into meaningful clinical outcomes.
Looking ahead
The findings provide a strong proof of concept that targeting the active metabolite directly, and at lower doses, may offer a more refined approach to prevention.
Future research will focus on confirming these results in larger populations and evaluating long-term effects on cancer incidence. There is also growing interest in integrating such approaches into broader prevention strategies, potentially alongside lifestyle interventions and risk-based screening.
For now, the study offers a promising step toward making preventive therapy both effective and tolerable. By reducing side effects without compromising efficacy, low-dose endoxifen could help overcome one of the key barriers in breast cancer prevention, and bring precision medicine principles into preventive care.
The post Breast Cancer Prevention Drug Endoxifen Shows Promise at Low Doses appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
Optical Pooled CRISPR Screen Reveals Regulators of NF-κB Dynamics in Human Cells
Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD
CSO
Myllia Biotechnology
Panelist
Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD
Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD, is a CRISPR enthusiast since the early days of CRISPR. Originally trained as a biochemist, he joined Haplogen as principal scientist and later became their CSO. Following the acquisition by Horizon Discovery, Tilmann served as director of research and development and later as head of innovation, where he oversaw the company’s technology platform and innovation agenda. In 2018, he co-founded Myllia Biotechnology which focuses on single-cell CRISPR screens. He is also the CEO of bit.bio discovery, a joined venture between Vienna-based Myllia Biotechnology and Cambridge-based bit.bio. Tilmann is passionate about science and enjoys working with multi-disciplinary and multi-national teams.
Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD
Director of Product Management
Element Biosciences
Panelist
Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD
Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD, is the director of product management at Element Biosciences. Prior experience includes a decade at 10x Genomics, where he developed and oversaw the product portfolio for Chromium products. Jens held the position of LSA Bio/Genomics Fellow at Life Science Angels, conducting extensive research on investment opportunities in biotech and genomics startups, and has worked in various consulting roles, focusing on product development and market analysis. Educational credentials include a PhD in biomedical engineering from Stanford University and a diploma in medical biotechnology from Technische Universität Berlin.
Broadcast Date:
- Time:
Integrated pooled CRISPR screening linked to imaging readouts accelerate target identification and functional characterization of signaling pathways. A good example of this can be found in studies of NF-κB signaling, which is central to inflammatory responses and driven by rapid nuclear translocation of the p50/p65 complex to activate transcriptional programs following cytokine stimulation.
In this GEN webinar, Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD, CSO at Myllia Biotechnology will show how high-throughput pooled CRISPR screening combined with cell painting readouts characterized important signaling pathways using NF-κB nuclear translocation as a case study. During the webinar, you will learn how the AVITI24
platform from Element Biosciences profiled ~440,000 cells in a pooled CRISPR screen targeting 195 genes. Linking genetic perturbations to p65 subcellular localization and cell painting features in a single workflow enabled identification of known pathway components, uncovered regulatory roles for chromatin-modifying complexes, and improved interpretation of phenotypic outcomes using morphological features.
Key takeaways include:
- Strategies for linking CRISPR perturbations to protein localization and morphological features at single-cell resolution
- Identification of hitherto poorly characterized chromatin modifying complexes in regulating NF-κB signaling
- The value of multimodal readouts, including morphology, in adding depth and confidence to recovered biology
- How this approach supports mechanism-of-action studies and enables identification of both positive and negative regulators of signaling pathways
A live Q&A session will follow the presentation offering you a chance to pose questions to our expert panelists.
Produced with support from:
The post Optical Pooled CRISPR Screen Reveals Regulators of NF-κB Dynamics in Human Cells appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
Biomarker of Epigenetic Aging Could Signal Depression
Research led by New York University suggests a marker of epigenetic aging could be linked to depression.
The team found that accelerated aging of a type of white blood cell called a monocyte was significantly associated with the psychological and cognitive expressions of depression in a group of women with and without HIV.
“Depression is not a one-size-fits-all disorder—it can look really different from person to person, which is why it’s so important to consider varied presentations and not just a clinical label,” said lead researcher Nicole Beaulieu Perez, PhD, assistant professor at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing, in a press statement.
“Our study reveals unique biological underpinnings of mental health that are often obscured by broad diagnostic categories.”
As reported in The Journals of Gerontology Series A, the researchers analyzed blood samples and depression scores from 440 women, 261 living with HIV and 179 without, from the Women’s Interagency HIV Study. They tested women with HIV as people with this disease and others affecting the immune system are at greater risk of depression than the general public.
The team looked at biological aging using two epigenetic clocks: a broad multi-tissue clock and a monocyte-specific clock that measures chemical modifications to DNA in these cells.
Depression was measured using the CES-D questionnaire, which separates physical, bodily expressions of depression such as fatigue, appetite loss, and agitation from psychological and cognitive expressions of the disorder such as hopelessness, anhedonia, and feelings of failure.
Accelerated monocyte aging was significantly associated with the psychological and cognitive expressions of depression and with anhedonia specifically, even after adjusting for HIV status, race, and ethnicity. The broader multi-tissue Horvath clock showed no association with any depression domain, suggesting it is the monocyte-specific aging signal, not generalized biological aging, that tracks with mood and cognitive symptoms.
Diagnosis of depression relies largely on self-reported symptoms and not a specific physiological test. The finding that monocyte aging maps onto cognitive and mood symptoms rather than physical ones is counterintuitive, since monocytes are inflammatory cells that one might expect to track physical, inflammation-driven complaints like fatigue.
The study is small and cross-sectional, so causality cannot yet be established, but if the claims of the study were validated it could help to personalize treatment for depression in the future.
“The dynamics of monocyte aging and depression warrant further study to clarify mechanistic links,” conclude the authors.
“Our findings bring us a step closer to this goal of precision mental health care, especially for high-risk populations, by providing a biological framework that could guide future diagnosis and treatment,” adds Beaulieu Perez.
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Researchers urge study of paternal deaths, though a new paper finds fatherhood is protective
Maternal health is a known crisis in the U.S., where pregnant women and new mothers die at a rate several times higher than in comparable countries. In recent years, increased awareness of the problem has led to interventions at the federal and state level and a strengthening of surveillance and data collection. Even as sizable improvements continue to be elusive, the picture of how many new mothers are dying, and why, is becoming clearer.
A research letter published on Monday in JAMA Pediatrics argues fathers deserve similar attention. To bolster their assertion, the authors reported the results of a pilot study in Georgia of deaths among fathers of children born in a single year, which found nearly 800 deaths in the first five years of fatherhood.
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The Elevance exec you need to know
Lawsuits alleging health insurers defrauded Medicare and other government programs take forever to litigate. Maybe they’re more about the friends you make along the way.
Big Tech Targets Drug Discovery with Wave of Life Science Platforms
Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, asserts that accelerated computing has a missing word: application acceleration. The “vertically integrated” and “horizontally open” chip maker is set on building the infrastructure that delivers AI into real world use.
“Accelerated computing is not a chip problem,” said Huang when he took the stage for his annual NVIDIA GTC keynote in San Jose in March. “The only way for us to accelerate applications and bring tremendous speed up and cost reduction is through domain specific acceleration.”
That mission has hit drug discovery, where approval timelines exceed a decade and clinical trial failure rates approach 90%.
A new wave of platforms from Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenAI, and Anthropic have customized general-purpose assistants into AI-powered workflows for science research. The trend points to the growing role of cloud infrastructure and agentic AI in unifying fragmented tools, streamlining data management, and making domain expertise more accessible.
Lab-in-the-loop
In April, AWS introduced Amazon Bio Discovery, a “lab-in-the-loop” workflow that combines access to more than 40 open-source and proprietary biological foundation models with AI agents that guide experimental design. The platform also integrates CRO partners, including Twist Bioscience, Ginkgo Bioworks, and A-Alpha Bio, for lab validation. The launch was announced at the AWS Life Sciences Symposium at the Javits Center in New York.
In collaboration with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Amazon Bio Discovery designed nanobodies with nanomolar affinities by generating nearly 300,000 candidates that were narrowed to the top 100,000 for wet lab testing in weeks, a noticeable reduction from the up to one year timeline typical of traditional methods.
Dan Sheeran, vice president and general manager, healthcare and life science at AWS, explains that while biological AI models have driven breakthroughs in areas, like protein design, their reliance on coding expertise and complex compute infrastructure remains a significant barrier to broader accessibility.
“Choosing the right model for a given task is itself a significant challenge. Computational biologists, the specialists who bridge AI and biology, are in short supply,” Sheeran told GEN Edge. “The result is a collaboration bottleneck, not because the science isn’t available, but because the tooling doesn’t support how these teams need to work together.”
David Younger, PhD, co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha Bio, adds that the partnership with AWS highlights a “fundamental gap” in AI-powered drug discovery, the lack of high-quality, experimental data at scale to evaluate protein design models. In silico candidates designed using Amazon Bio Discovery can be rapidly validated in the lab with A-Alpha’s AlphaSeq platform, which quantitatively measures protein-protein interactions by the hundreds to millions.
“The convergence of technology and life sciences isn’t just about faster compute or better algorithms,” Younger told GEN Edge. “It’s about connecting those advances to real-world, experimental observations.”
Amazon Bio Discovery is built on the same AWS infrastructure that is currently adopted by 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies. Each organization’s data is isolated within its application environment, and all proprietary data, models, and designs remain customer-owned.
Rosalind reasons
Two days after Amazon Bio Discovery’s launch, OpenAI announced GPT-Rosalind, a specialized reasoning model that supports evidence synthesis, hypothesis generation, and experimental planning for research across biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine. The platform includes a freely accessible life sciences research plugin for Codex that connects to over 50 public multiomics databases, literature repositories, and computational biology tools.
The model is available through a trusted-access program for qualified enterprise customers in the U.S. Amgen, Moderna, the Allen Institute, and Thermo Fisher Scientific are among GPT‑Rosalind’s customers.
“Research organizations are actively looking for systems that are built for scientific workflows, not adapted from general-purpose models, and life sciences remains one of the most important areas where better tools could meaningfully accelerate progress,” wrote OpenAI in an email to GEN Edge when describing the motivation for building GPT-Rosalind.
Named after Rosalind Franklin, PhD, whose work was critical in the discovery of the DNA double helix, the model scored 0.751 on BixBench, a benchmark that evaluates large language model (LLM) performance in bioinformatics and computational biology tasks. The score was a modest lead ahead of GPT-5.4, xAI’s Grok 4.2, and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro.
On LABBench2, a benchmark spanning literature retrieval, database access, sequence manipulation, and protocol design, GPT-Rosalind outperformed GPT-5.4 on six out of 11 tasks. The largest improvement was shown on CloningQA, which requires end-to-end design of DNA constructs and enzyme reagents for molecular cloning workflows.
GPT-Rosalind is one step in OpenAI’s growing momentum across pharma and healthcare. In recent weeks, the company introduced ChatGPT for Clinicians to support clinical workflows, such as documentation and medical research, alongside partnerships with Novo Nordisk to enhance workforce AI readiness and improve manufacturing and supply chain efficiency, and Massive Bio to expand access to clinical trials.
Inference inflection
Anthropic is forging its own path into life sciences, having recently drawn attention for acquiring Coefficient Bio, a roughly 10-person AI drug discovery start-up founded by former Genentech scientists, for $400 million.
The OpenAI competitor has also been building Claude for Life Sciences, the AI assistant specialized for researchers, clinical coordinators, and regulatory affairs managers, since last fall.
In an October blog post, Anthropic reported that the customized platform powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5 scored 0.83 in Protocol QA, a benchmark that tests the model’s understanding of laboratory protocols. The score outperformed the human baseline of 0.79 and Sonnet 4’s performance of 0.74. Claude for Life Sciences also incorporates several connectors to scientific platforms, including Benchling’s digital notebooks, PubMed literature, and 10x Genomics tools for single cell and spatial analysis.
“We want to give scientists the same experience as software engineers of having a brainstorming partner to work with and to delegate tasks,” said Eric Kauderer-Abrams, PhD, head of biology and life sciences at Anthropic, in a video accompanying the product launch.
In January, Anthropic expanded the platform to Claude for Healthcare, a complementary set of tools that allow healthcare providers, payers, and health tech companies and startups to use Claude for medical purposes through HIPAA-ready products.
When reflecting on these life science releases, Enke Bashllari, PhD, founder and managing director at Arkitekt Ventures, says the three are “playing different games.” OpenAI is selling the “sharpest reasoning engine” with limited access, while AWS is building infrastructure and lab integration. Anthropic is betting on breadth of workflow and making acquisitions to close the specialization gap.
“For startups, the question isn’t which platform wins. It’s which layer you build on,” wrote Bashllari on LinkedIn.
Chris Leiter, founder and general partner at Atria Ventures, believes the shift to bioconsumerism will be the “most significant period of disruption for life sciences in the modern era.”
“Medicine is the use case that justifies the entire buildout,” wrote Leiter on LinkedIn. “The public skepticism starts to erode when the output is a drug that reaches a patient five years early, or a diagnostic that catches a cancer no doctor would have seen.”
As models increasingly move beyond isolated predictions into complex reasoning across biological systems, the question is no longer whether to adopt, but how quickly the industry can adapt to a new scientific discovery paradigm.
Huang says it best, “we are now in the beginning of a new platform shift. The inference inflection has arrived.”
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