Scientists in the United States have developed a general-purpose antibody that they hope will help revolutionize antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) manufacturing. The team, from Johns Hopkins University, says they mutated the fragment crystallizable (FC) region, the part of an antibody that modulates immune response. The aim was to create new sites to attach molecules, including nanoparticle drugs or fluorescent markers for quality assurance.
According to Jamie Spangler, PhD, associate professor of biomedical engineering and chemical & biomolecular engineering, the new antibodies could—in the future—lead to more effective and easier-to-manufacture drug conjugates.
“The chemistry of antibody drug conjugates is so heterogeneous. It can be hard to characterize the drug-to-antibody ratio and to [do things like] maintain consistency in formulations.”
To get around this problem, Spangler’s team installed six mutations on the FC region of an antibody that can act as attachment sites for a variety of molecules. The team was able to attach a dye to quantify how many sites were available and discovered the best productivity was found when using up to four sites.
They emphasize that the sites can be used for many purposes.
“You can attach whatever you want,” Spangler explains. “You could use [them] to make an antibody-dye conjugate or even a drug conjugate.”
According to Spangler, the team has already shown that the mutations can be used to conjugate with nanoparticles. “We encapsulate the protein we want to deliver within the nanoparticle, and then we coat the surface with an antibody. The nanoparticle we’re carrying, in this case, contains some GFP [green fluorescent protein], which is a fluorescent readout, but we can attach that to an antibody.”
After the antibody binds to a cell expressing the target, it’s internalized, and the nanoparticle can release its cargo, she explains. This system can be used for any number of purposes.
“The sky’s the limit for how people want to use this in their own research and their own work,” she says. “It’s a fully tuneable and generalisable system, and we’d encourage people to think broadly and creatively about the different attachments they can use.”
Hands-on biomanufacturing training is expensive, regardless of whether that training occurs in manufacturing facilities where training may take production units offline, or in community colleges and universities where the availability of equipment and consumables may limit training time.
A mixed-reality fermentation training platform dubbed BioSuite Virtual solves much of that challenge.
Developed by Prism Immersive with funding from BioMADE and expertise from an industry consortium, BioSuite Virtual immerses learners in a world in which they interact with a virtual bioreactor in their physical space. Conversely, the perhaps more familiar augmented reality lets learners interact with physical objects with virtual overlays.
BioSuite Virtual consists of more than 40 different modules across 12 chapters, starting with a short introduction to the biomanufacturing space, followed by content-specific modules.
“It’s end-to-end fermentation training,” Jared DeCoste, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Prism Immersive, tells GEN. “Learners gain vital skills along the way as they assemble a bioreactor, sterilize it, inoculate it, add the media, set the controls, and perform a run. They monitor the run by taking samples and observing the fermentation conditions, making necessary adjustments throughout.” As a learner, “you can do things multiple times if you need to. You can start and stop. You can go at your own pace, all the way through the run.”
Shaped by fermentation SMEs
Training is based on best practices from industry subject matter experts—especially Amyris, which shared its processing best practices and expertise with Prism early on—and partners at Bioscience Core Skills Institute (BCSI), Northeastern University, and Harford Community College who shaped and piloted the software. Prism made these connections with the support of BioMADE’s member network.
This lets all users learn from what Dan Beaupré, COO and co-founder of Prism, calls “the best of the best” in precision fermentation. “BioSuite Virtual is informed by dozens of subject matter experts [from industry],” he stresses.
“BioSuite Virtual isn’t meant to completely supplant in-person training,” Beaupré adds. “It’s a precursor, where users can obtain literacy and develop operational familiarity with precision fermentation workflows before they touch real equipment.” Because they have this foundation, trainers can then focus on teaching more complex processes and scenarios.
Prism’s first clients, community colleges, began using the virtual training tool this spring, and “about a dozen others” from Massachusetts to Hawaii are licensing it for use in the next academic year. DeCoste reports interest from contract development and manufacturing organizations and biopharma companies, too. “One of the great things about software is that you can modify it for the exact procedures utilized within [a specific] environment.”
Going forward, Prism Immersive plans to create new modules in such areas as biosafety cabinet operations and aseptic training, “because that’s what industry is calling for,” Beaupré says.
“All sorts of things are possible in XR [mixed, augmented, or virtual reality], as long as they’re well-designed,” Beaupré emphasizes. “Everything we do is intentional,” and knowledge checks are built in to reinforce and validate learning. After successfully completing the course, learners have the option to be credentialed through BCSI.
A persistent global shortfall has long defined the organ transplantation landscape, but a new generation of biofabrication and biomanufacturing technologies is positioning the field for a shift from scarcity to scale. As Boyang Wang, founder and CEO of Immortal Dragons, puts it bluntly, “There is a structural shortage,” even as transplant numbers reach record highs.
In 2024, approximately 174,000 solid-organ transplants were performed worldwide, yet nearly 668,000 patients remained on waitlists, Wang says. The mismatch is stark—and deadly. “We have a therapy that works, but the input—organs—is fundamentally scarce and cannot be scaled,” Wang says, underscoring the central limitation of modern transplantation systems.
This imbalance is driving a paradigm shift toward what Wang describes as a “replacement strategy” for medicine. Rather than attempting to repair every failing biological pathway, the idea is to replace entire organs. “The human body has hundreds of ways to fail, but only one way to work correctly,” he explains. “Trying to patch every individual failure mode is inherently inefficient.”
At the center of this shift lies bioprocessing. The challenge is no longer just proving that engineered tissues can work, but manufacturing them reproducibly at scale. Early progress is evident in simpler tissues. Bioengineered vascular grafts, for example, have already demonstrated that “engineered tissues can be manufactured, regulated, and used in real patients,” marking an inflection point for the field, Wang notes.
Scaling up to full organs, however, remains a formidable engineering problem. “The main blockers are vascularization and hierarchy,” Wang says, referring to the difficulty of building thick tissues with complex, multi-scale blood vessel networks. Without this architecture, engineered organs cannot sustain long-term function in vivo.
Reproducibility presents another major hurdle. Moving from bespoke, lab-built constructs to standardized, GMP-grade products requires precise control over every step of the manufacturing process. “We need reproducible, GMP-grade biofabrication processes that can deliver organs as ‘products,’ not artisanal one-offs,” Wang emphasizes.
Parallel advances in xenotransplantation are helping to expand supply in the near term. Gene-edited pig organs have shown increasing promise, with recent cases demonstrating months of sustained function in human recipients, Wang points out. These efforts, combined with advances in immunomodulation, could extend organ lifespans and broaden clinical applicability.
Still, biology remains a constraint. “Even when you get an organ, it’s not a generic spare part,” Wang notes, pointing to immune rejection, compatibility challenges, and the burden of lifelong immunosuppression. These factors limit both access and long-term outcomes.
Logistics also impose hard limits. Traditional donor organs degrade quickly, creating tight time windows for transplantation. “Organs can only stay viable for a very short cold ischemia window,” Wang says, underscoring how geography and coordination directly impact patient survival.
Despite these challenges, momentum is building. “We’re past the sci-fi stage and into early clinical reality,” Wang observes, pointing to both engineered tissues and xenotransplants entering human trials.
The road ahead will require advances not only in science but also in infrastructure. A future of scalable organ replacement will demand new regulatory pathways, reimbursement models, and healthcare delivery systems.
If successful, biomanufacturing could fundamentally reshape transplantation—transforming it from a donor-limited procedure into a scalable, industrialized therapy. Wang envisions a world where life-saving organs are not found, but made.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Colossal Biosciences is growing chickens in a 3D-printed artificial eggshell
The baby chicks were shifting and starting to pip—or trying to hatch. But not from an egg. Instead, these chickens were growing inside transparent 3D-printed plastic cups at the Dallas headquarters of Colossal Biosciences.
The biotech company yesterday claimed it has developed a “fully artificial egg” as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa.
Some scientists think Colossal is overstating the breakthrough. But the technology may represent an early step toward artificial wombs.
Elon Musk has lost his landmark lawsuit against OpenAI, which centered on allegations that its cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman misled him about the company’s nonprofit mission. But what really happened in the courtroom, and what does it mean for the AI race?
AI reporter and attorney Michelle Kim, who covered the trial for MIT Technology Review, joined our editor in chief Mat Honan to unpack it all in an exclusive Roundtables discussion yesterday.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: this scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain
L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature of around −146 degrees °C for over a decade, largely undisturbed. Before he died in 2014, Coles had the brain frozen with an ambitious goal in mind: reanimation.
His friend, cryobiologist Greg Fahy, believes it could be revived one day. But other experts are less optimistic.
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
Can AI learn to understand the world?
The limitations of LLMs are pushing AI researchers towards new systems that understand the physical environment: world models. The likes of Google DeepMind, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and Meta’s former Chief AI Scientist, AI Yann LeCun, have brought this technology to the forefront of AI.
To explore where this technology is heading next, MIT Technology Review is hosting an exclusive Roundtables discussion on Thursday, May 21, with editor in chief Mat Honan, senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven, and AI reporter Grace Huckins. Register here to join the session at 19:30 GMT / 2:30 PM ET / 11:30 AM PT.
World models are also one of MIT Technology Review’s10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Google is changing its search box for the first time in 25 years Its AI-powered overhaul centers on an “intelligent search box”. (Wired $) + “Information agents” will gather information on a user’s behalf. (TechCrunch) + Google, Gemini, and Gmail may one day be a single search box. (The Verge) + AI means the end of search as we know it. (MIT Technology Review)
2 Samsung workers plan to strike tomorrow over AI profit sharing They say that their employer isn’t sharing the rewards of the AI boom. (WSJ $) + And want 15% of the company’s annual operating profit. (CNBC) + South Korea may invoke emergency powers to stop the strike. (Reuters $)
3 The White House is set to release a new executive order on AI safety It’s slated to launch this week. (Axios) + The order seeks early government access to advanced models. (NYT $)
4 The FBI plans to buy nationwide access to license plate readers It wants “data in near real time” from cameras across the US. (Ars Technica) + The tech could let it track drivers nationwide. (Newsweek)
5 Google will launch a new line of smart glasses this fall They’re the company’s first attempt since the Google Glass flop. (BBC) + Google Gemini will power the interactions with the user. (Guardian) + Meanwhile, Anduril and Meta are making smart glasses for warfare. (MIT Technology Review)
6 A new bill in Congress proposes a new annual fee for EVs It could cost drivers an extra $130 a year. (NYT $) + The fee will cover highway maintenance costs. (WSJ $)
7 OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined rival lab Anthropic Karpathy was also previously Tesla’s director of AI. (Fortune) + He coined the term “vibe coding.” (MIT Technology Review)
8 The fears over Anthropic’s Mythos AI model look overstated Cybersecurity experts say the hacking threat is exaggerated. (Reuters $)
9 Silicon Valley keeps misreading China’s role in tech Viewing Chinese firms as enemies could do more to hurt than help the US. (Rest of World)
10 A book about AI’s effects on truth contains false quotes created by AI It’s among a spate of controversies involving AI-generated quotes. (NYT $) + Yesterday, a lawyer apologised for including them in a court filing. (Reuters $) + A senior journalist was recently suspended for using them. (Guardian)
Quote of the day
“It may be that the judges have now awarded a prize to an instance of AI plagiarism—we don’t yet know, and perhaps we never will know.”
—Sigrid Rausing, publisher of literary magazine Granta, casts doubts on the authenticity of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winners, Wired reports.
One More Thing
SELMAN DESIGN
Who gets to decide who receives experimental medical treatments?
Max was only a toddler when his parents noticed there was “something different” about the way he moved. He was slower than other kids his age, and he struggled to jump. He couldn’t run. A genetic test confirmed their fears: Max had Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Desperate to slow its progression, Max’s parents enrolled him in an experimental gene therapy trial. The FDA had approved the medicine on weak evidence—a move that has become increasingly common.
We urgently need to question how these decisions are made. Who should have access to experimental therapies? And who should get to decide?
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will partner with Parabilis Medicines to discover and develop an initial five candidates encompassing a new form of antibody-drug conjugates aimed at challenging and historically undruggable targets, through a strategic research collaboration that could generate up to $2.3 billion-plus for the Cambridge, MA, biotech.
Regeneron will marry its antibody capabilities with Parabilis’ stabilized helical peptide or Helicon platform, to develop both Antibody-Helicon Conjugates (AHCs) as well as stand-alone therapies based on Helicons—stabilized, cell-penetrant alpha-helical peptides designed to engage intracellular protein targets, including flat surfaces that are not well suited to traditional small molecule binding.
While ADCs traditionally use antibodies to selectively deliver drug payloads into target cells to induce their death from within, the AHCs envisioned by Regeneron and Parabilis would combine antibody-targeted cell access with Helicon payloads designed to selectively modulate specific intracellular proteins, including some long-undruggable proteins.
“In addition to the potential of Helicons to address previously undruggable targets, the collaboration’s intent to couple Helicons to our VelocImmune® derived-antibodies so as to precisely deliver them to cells of interest represents an exciting new approach with the potential to create an entirely new therapeutic class that can span multiple therapeutic areas,” George D. Yancopoulos, MD, PhD, Regeneron’s board co-chair, president, and CSO, said in a statement.
Regeneron has agreed to pay Parabilis $125 million, consisting of a $450 million upfront payment and commitment to invest $75 million in Parabilis’ next equity financing, subject to specified conditions. Regeneron also agreed to pay Parabilis payments tied to achieving development, regulatory, and commercial milestones, as well as tiered royalties up to the low double-digits on future net sales of any approved medicines resulting from the collaboration.
Five initial targets
With five initial targets, the collaboration agreement could generate up to approximately $2.2 billion in total milestone payments to Parabilis.
Under the terms of the agreement, additional targets may be pursued upon additional option payments from Regeneron.
Regeneron shares fell nearly 10% Monday, to $629.68, from Friday’s close of $698.25, and plateaued on Tuesday, inching up 0.1% to $630.30. The Monday drop reflected not the Parabilis deal but a clinical setback: Regeneron on Friday evening acknowledged the failure of a Phase III trial (NCT05352672) assessing two dose levels of the lymphocyte-activation gene-3 (LAG-3) inhibitor fianlimab in combination with a PD-1 inhibitor, Regeneron’s marketed drug Libtayo® (cemiplimab), as a first-line treatment for patients with previously-untreated, unresectable locally advanced or metastatic melanoma.
Fianlimab plus cemiplimab failed the trial by not reaching statistical significance for the primary endpoint of improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) compared to monotherapy with another PD-1 inhibitor, Merck & Co.’s Keytruda® (pembrolizumab), the multi-indication cancer immunotherapy, Regeneron said, in an announcement released more than four hours after the close of financial markets.
Parabilis, a privately held company which rebranded from FogPharma in 2024, rang in 2026 by announcing the closing of a $305 million Series F financing on January 8, with proceeds intended to support continued clinical development of its lead helicon peptide candidate zolucatetide (formerly FOG-001)—a first and only direct inhibitor of the elusive β-catenin:TCF interaction, according to the company—including progression toward a registrational trial in desmoid tumors and continued evaluation across genetically simple and more complex tumor types.
Positive preliminary data
In March, Parabilis presented preliminary clinical data at the 11th Biennial Meeting of the International Society for Gastrointestinal Hereditary Tumors (InSiGHT) showing significant improvement in duodenal polyposis at 60 weeks in a patient with familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) treated with zolucatetide in the company’s ongoing Phase I/II trial (NCT05919264).
The patient showed a 52.2% reduction in desmoid tumor diameter, as well as “substantial” reductions in polyp number and size compared with a pre-treatment evaluation nearly two years prior, consistent with downstaging from Spigelman stage II to stage I.
The financing, Parabilis added, will also support advancement of its targeted discovery pipeline, including its prostate cancer franchise, and additional efforts to leverage the company’s Helicon platform to unlock long-undruggable disease targets.
In addition to zolucatetide, Parabilis’ pipeline includes:
Two prostate cancer-fighting discovery phase programs, an ERG degrader Helicon program, and an androgen receptor degrader
A beta-catenin degrader Helicon program targeting mutations in the Wnt/β-catenin pathway, linked to 80–90% of cases of colorectal cancer, that is also in discovery phase
A Helicon-enabled alpha radioligand therapies (HEARTs) program against multiple cancer targets, a program partnered with ARTBIO, in hit identification phase.
“Through our own pipeline, we have demonstrated the potential of Helicon peptides to directly inhibit or degrade several disease-driving proteins in oncology that have long been considered out of reach,” stated Mathai Mammen, MD, PhD, Parabilis’ chairman, CEO, and president. “We are thrilled to enter into a collaboration with Regeneron that builds on this foundation, combining the intracellular access and binding capabilities of our Helicons against challenging targets with antibodies from Regeneron.”
The baby chicks were shifting and starting to pip—or trying to hatch. But not from an egg.
Instead, these chickens were growing inside transparent 3D-printed plastic cups at the Dallas headquarters of Colossal Biosciences.
The biotech company today claimed it has developed a “fully artificial egg” as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa.
But “artificial eggshell” would probably be a better description for the invention. It’s an oval-shaped printed lattice, coated inside with a special silicone-based membrane that lets in oxygen, just as a real eggshell does.
To generate birds, Colossal took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing. A window on top lets researchers peek inside.
“To see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind blowing,” says Andrew Pask, the company’s chief biology officer. “You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb.”
Colossal was founded in 2021 with plans to use gene editing and reproductive technology to restore extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. It’s since raised more than $800 million toward what it now terms the “scalable and controllable” creation of animals.
According to Pask, the egg technology could help conserve at-risk bird species. It could also play a role in a project to re-create the extinct giant moa, a flightless 12-foot-tall bird that once lived in New Zealand and laid four-liter eggs, larger than those of any living bird.
But Colossal may be able build one that’s big enough. The company provided a photograph of a prototype 3D-printed egg so large that staff have started to call it the “salad spinner.”
The moa went extinct after canoes carrying the ancestors of the Maori arrived on New Zealand’s South Island about 750 years ago. Archeological sites showcase the birds’ bones alongside stone cutting tools—clear evidence that they were hunted.
To be clear—Colossal isn’t close to re-creating the moa. Before that could happen, scientists would need to study DNA data from old moa bones and insert thousands of genetic changes into the genome of an existing bird, something that’s still technically difficult to do—with or without an artificial egg.
COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES
Some scientists also think Colossal is taking too much credit for its artificial eggshell, which it announced in a thundering YouTube video intoning that the company has solved the “impossible question of which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
The video is pure Hollywood—it’s meant to be funny and exciting. But Colossal has a habit of antagonizing scientists by making false and exaggerated claims. Last year, for instance, the company said it had re-created the extinct dire wolf—a claim widely rejected by experts.
This time, Colossal’s fluffed-up assertion of having created the “first-ever shell-less incubation system” is what’s raising hackles among the small flock of scientists who’ve been working on the technology for years.
“Clearly an overstatement,” says Katsuya Obara, at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, who in 2024 hatched chickens from beneath transparent plastic film. “The technology here is essentially a modification of existing methods.”
In fact, Obara notes, growing birds in artificial containers goes all the way back to 1998, when another Japanese group managed to do it with quail.
What may be an advance by Colossal is the special membrane, which lets the embryo access more oxygen. Previous systems required scientists to supplement the gas—something that may not have been good for the chicks, as often some of them would fail to hatch.
The work on the artificial eggshell was carried out in Dallas by Colossal’s exogenous development team, or Exo Dev. That group is also trying to develop artificial wombs for mammals, starting with marsupials.
“We’re looking at every single facet of what’s happening during a mammalian pregnancy to unpack exactly how we then go about recapitulating that,” says Pask.
For that team, an artificial eggshell is a relatively quick and easy technical win. That’s because chickens are already an example of ex utero development. After an egg is laid, a small embryo sitting on top of the yolk starts growing, drawing nutrients from the yolk, the white, and even the shell, which provides calcium. (Colossal says it has to add ground-up calcium to the artificial eggs.)
COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES
In order to create a moa, Colossal will have to genetically alter another type of bird, changing potentially thousands of DNA letters. But so far, chickens are the only bird species that can be genetically engineered. And that’s via a tricky process of editing stem cells that produce egg and sperm. Scientists have to add or delete DNA letters from these cells and then inject them back into an egg. The resulting bird will carry the genetic changes in its gonads—and then be able to pass them on.
Pask says Colossal’s idea is that it could modify avian stem cells enough to produce moa-like sperm or eggs. But then you might have the odd situation of a chicken laying an egg with a moa embryo inside it. “You would have chickens making moa egg and moa sperm. But it’s still a chicken egg,” he says.
Helen Sang, a professor emeritus at the Roslin Institute in the United Kingdom, says she’s not sure a moa embryo could survive on the yolk of a chicken egg, given evolutionary differences. “There are significant challenges to overcome to grow an embryo of a different species in artificial eggs,” says Sang.
Just one of those is the huge size discrepancy. The amount of yolk in a chicken egg would hardly be enough to support the much larger moa chick. Yet Pask says that is exactly where the artificial egg will come in handy.
He says it may be possible to use a fine needle to slowly “put 50 yolks together to make that yolk mass much larger.”
“The chicken egg isn’t going to be big enough to support the growth of the moa through to term, to when it would normally hatch, but that’s when you could then take that egg, put it into the artificial egg environment, and then scale it up in size,” he says.
So far, Pask says, the artificial egg is working well for chickens—almost too well. “We hatched 26 chickens and then [our CEO] asked us to put the brakes on. We have too many chickens running around.”
Kraig Biocraft Laboratories reports that company scientists created an immortalized silk gland cell line which Kraig officials say could form the foundation for a next-generation biotech platform with potential applications in biopharmaceutical manufacturing, therapeutic peptides, biologically active proteins, and advanced biomaterials.
This development significantly expands the potential commercial reach of the company’s core technologies beyond recombinant spider silk fibers and textiles, according to Kim Thompson, founder and CEO.
“This scientific achievement opens the potential for entirely new markets,” notes Thompson. “While our research team is expanding our portfolio and creating exciting new opportunities, management remains focused on the ongoing expansion of recombinant spider silk production and commercialization.”
The company’s research team successfully isolated and established immortalized silk gland cells that demonstrate strong proliferative capacity, stable serial passaging, and robust long-term viability in vitro, he adds. Early testing has shown exceptionally strong recombinant protein expression and production capabilities, positioning the platform as a promising candidate for scalable industrial bioprocessing and recombinant protein manufacturing, continues Thompson.
“The potential applications for this technology are extraordinarily broad,” maintains Xiaoli Zhang, PhD, Kraig Labs’ CSO. “We believe these immortalized silk gland cells could become the basis for a highly versatile biotechnology platform capable of supporting future work in therapeutics, vaccines, recombinant proteins, and next-generation biomaterials.”
The immortalized cell line has also reportedly demonstrated adaptability toward suspension culture systems, which are critical for large-scale industrial manufacturing and modern bioprocessing. This capability could allow the platform to integrate with conventional bioprocessing infrastructure and support more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective production systems, points out Zhang.
Google DeepMind and Edison Scientific are on an ambitious mission to build the AI scientist. These platforms propose to automate the scientific method using reasoning systems that connect hypothesis generation, experimental design, and data interpretation in one platform. In drug discovery, where traditional development timelines can stretch beyond a decade, such systems promise to dramatically accelerate the pace of biomedical research.
The AlphaFold developer and the nonprofit home organization behind Edison, FutureHouse, originally introduced their respective systems, Co-Scientist and Robin, as bioRxiv preprints in early 2025. Those studies have now been published in Nature, marking another step toward a growing ecosystem of specialized AI agents for life science research.
Led by Demis Hassabis, PhD, CEO, and 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry, DeepMind isno stranger to expanding biomedicine. The team published a January Nature paper describing AlphaGenome, a unifying DNA sequence model for regulatory variant-effect prediction to support understanding of genome function and disease biology.
Additionally, DeepMind drug discovery spinout, Isomorphic Labs, recently made waves after securing a whopping $2.1 billion Series B led by Thrive Capital, signaling the industry’s growing investment in AI-driven therapeutics.
“I’ve always believed the No.1 application of AI should be to improve human health,” wrote Hassabis on LinkedIn when announcing Isomorphic’s blockbuster raise.
DeepMind’s newly published AI assistant, Co-Scientist, is a general-purpose multi-agent system built with Google’s Gemini and driven by natural language prompts. The platform demonstrated initial validation across three biomedical applications: drug repurposing for acute myeloid leukemia, novel target discovery for liver fibrosis, and explaining mechanisms of anti-microbial resistance.
Co-Scientist’s design scales test-time compute to iteratively reason, evolve, and improve the output as it gathers more knowledge. Researchers can also actively steer the system by refining generated ideas or providing feedback through the natural language chat.
Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at DeepMind, emphasizes that time is a valuable commodity when tackling disease. Co-Scientist aims to support humans scientists in reaching answers to their problems much faster than before, from “months and years to minutes and hours.”
“To realize this vision, we need to build in reliability, trustworthiness and ensure a collaborative human-AI interaction paradigm. We have done a lot of research on these aspects and we are continuing to improve,” Natarajan told GEN Edge.
Closing the loop
Edison is the commercial spinout of FutureHouse, an AI scientist non-profit backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founded by Sam Rodriques, PhD, former group leader at The Francis Crick Institute and Edison’s CEO. The team’s newly published platform, Robin, leverages both OpenAI o4-mini and Anthropic Claude 3.7 to aid biological discovery.
In research tasks, Robin proposed repurposing Ripasudil, an existing drug for treatment of glaucoma, to address dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD) via a novel mechanism that enhanced retinal pigment epithelial cell phagocytosis. The platform also suggested a circadian clock modulator, KL001, as an unexpected treatment for dAMD, illustrating the ability to make new connections not found in existing literature. Both insights were experimentally validated in patient-derived retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells.
Since Robin’s May 2025 preprint release, Edison unveiled an updated AI scientist, Kosmos, last November. Kosmos can reason over 175 million full-text papers, clinical trials and patents, and operate interactively as a colleague that can sends updates mid-run. The system is reported to perform hundreds of research tasks in parallel to compress months of work into a single day.
Today, Edison announced a collaboration with Incyte to employ Kosmos across the global pharma’s discovery and development pipeline. The partnership will focus on enabling continuous learning from translational and clinical data, real-time synthesis of evidence, and predictive models of therapeutic performance.
Michaela Hinks, founding member of technical staff at Edison, says the main bottlenecks for AI scientist adoption are trust, validation, and the gap in end-to-end solutions.
“Most AI tools accelerate the cheaper and easier upstream work, but not the expensive and regulated downstream stages of scientific research,” Hinks told GEN Edge.
She also highlights Robin as the first demonstration of an agentic AI scientist generating a hypothesis that is tested and validated in patient-derived cells, not an immortalized cell line, supporting clinically actionable insights for patients in need.
Whether AI scientists will truly revolutionize discovery remains to be seen, but researchers are already beginning the experiment.
platform, to develop both Antibody-Helicon
