Tag: Biotech

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The Download: inside the Musk v. Altman trial, and AI for democracy

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.

Week one of the Musk v. Altman trial: what it was like in the room

Two of the most powerful figures in AI—Sam Altman and Elon Musk—are in the middle of a landmark legal showdown, with Musk alleging he was misled about OpenAI becoming a for-profit company.

Our reporter Michelle Kim, who also happens to be a lawyer, has been in court each day, and has broken down the first week’s key moments in her latest report. In a new Q&A, she also reveals what it was like in the room, the new details that have emerged about how Musk and OpenAI operate—and what we can expect from this week’s proceedings.

Find out what she’s discovered so far, and if you want to keep up with MIT Technology Review’s ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial, follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X.

—James O’Donnell

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday. 

A blueprint for using AI to strengthen democracy

—Andrew Sorota & Josh Hendler lead work on AI and democracy at the Office of Eric Schmidt.

Faster than many realize, AI is becoming the primary interface through which we form beliefs and participate in democratic self-governance. This shift could further strain already fragile institutions, but it could also help address problems like polarization and declining civic engagement.

What happens next depends on design choices that are already being made, whether we know it or not. Here’s how we can harness AI to strengthen democracy.

Artificial scientists: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

Large language models can already assist scientists in all sorts of ways, from writing code to searching through literature and drafting articles. But companies and labs have a much more ambitious vision. They want to build AI systems that can act as a full member of a scientific team—and even conduct entire research projects.

These artificial scientists seem like a win for frontier labs and for society at large. But they could also narrow the scope of scientific inquiry.

Read the full story on how artificial scientists could reshape the research process—and what might be lost along the way.

—Grace Huckins

Artificial scientists is an item on our list of the 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, MIT Technology Review’s guide to what’s really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI. We’re unpacking one item from the list each day here in The Download, so stay tuned.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The Pentagon has struck sweeping AI deals for classified work
It’s signed contracts with Microsoft, Nvidia, AWS, and Reflection AI. (NYT $)
+ It wants the US military to be an “AI-first” force. (BBC)
+ The announcement leaves Anthropic increasingly isolated. (WP $)
+ Here’s how the firms could train on classified data. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Elon Musk has finally settled the SEC lawsuit over the Twitter purchase
He’s agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine for waiting too long to disclose his initial stock purchases. (Guardian)
+ But won’t lose any of the $150 million he allegedly saved. (The Verge)
+ Musk allegedly illegally hid his growing Twitter stake. (CBS News)

3 A Chinese court has ruled that firms can’t lay off workers on AI grounds
They can’t terminate employees just to replace them with AI. (Bloomberg $)
+ The court said a firm had illegally fired one of its workers. (NPR)
+ Chinese tech workers are starting to train their AI doubles—and pushing back. (MIT Technology Review)

4 A gene therapy is helping deaf children hear again
In a trial, 80% of patients gained measurable hearing. (Vox)

5 The White House is vetting AI models before they’re released
It may create a new working group to oversee AI development. (NYT $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Nature has retracted a paper on ChatGPT’s educational benefits
Over “discrepancies” and a lack of confidence in the findings. (404 Media)
+ The paper had already racked up hundreds of citations. (Ars Technica)
+ AI giants want to take over the classroom. (MIT Technology Review)

7 GameStop made a $56 billion bid for eBay
eBay said it was reviewing the offer. (Ars Technica)
+ The bid has drawn skepticism from investors and analysts. (Reuters $)

8 AI systems are increasingly used to monitor workers’ emotions
New tools claim to measure “agreeability” as well as productivity. (The Atlantic $)

9 Peter Thiel is backing wave-powered data centers
He’s leading a $140 million investment into a startup developing the tech. (FT $)

10 Ask Jeeves is shutting down after nearly 30 years online
The closure marks the end of one of the internet’s earliest search engines. (NYT $)

Quote of the day

“By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America.” 

—Elon Musk texted a warning to OpenAI president Greg Brockman two days before their courtroom battle started, NBC News reports.

One More Thing

SIMON MITCHELL


Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go

Two hundred and thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, a team of extreme divers tested a route to new depth records: breathing hydrogen.

They believe the gas could help the human body withstand underwater pressure significantly past its natural threshold. But the approach is highly experimental—and dangerous.

Find out how far they’re willing to go.

—Samantha Schuyler

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Wild horses are roaming in Spain for the first time in 10,000 years.
+ Star Wars meets the Renaissance in this bardcore cover of the “Imperial March.”
+ Improve your writing by avoiding these six common linguistic pitfalls shared by many Americans.
+ From Stephen King’s IT changing the clown industry to Black Widow boosting hair dye sales, here are 12 times movies changed the real world.

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Gene Syntax Determines DNA Supercoiling and Modulates Gene Expression

When synthetic biologists sketch gene circuits, they usually think in terms of promoters, repressors, and transcription factors—biochemical parts that toggle genes on or off. But DNA is not a flat schematic. It’s a physical polymer that twists, coils, and buckles as genes are transcribed. A pair of new papers from MIT and collaborators shows that this physicality could suggest approaches to controlling the output of gene circuits.

In a recent Science study titled “Gene syntax defines supercoiling-mediated transcriptional feedback,” researchers demonstrate that the order and orientation of neighboring genes—what they call gene syntax—can reshape local DNA supercoiling and, in turn, amplify or suppress the expression of adjacent genes.

“Syntax will be really useful for dynamic circuits. Now we have the ability to select not only the biochemistry of circuits, but also the physical design to support dynamics,” said Katie Galloway, PhD, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at MIT.

The team engineered human cell lines and hiPSCs with synthetic two‑gene reporter circuits arranged in tandem, divergent, or convergent configurations. Their earlier modeling predicted that divergent syntax should boost the expression of both genes, while tandem syntax should suppress the downstream gene. “The thing that we were trying to solve in this paper was: When you put two genes on the same piece of DNA, how does their physical interaction become coupled?” said Galloway. The experimental results matched those predictions: divergent circuits amplified both genes, while tandem circuits showed strong upstream‑to‑downstream repression, with effects reaching up to 25‑fold.

To understand why, the researchers used Region Capture Micro‑C, a high‑resolution genome‑folding mapping technique, to visualize how transcription reshapes DNA. When a gene was activated, the DNA downstream tightened into plectonemes—twisted structures that hinder RNA polymerase binding—while upstream DNA loosened. “Supercoiling impacts transcription of adjacent genes by altering RNA polymerase binding, forming a feedback loop,” the authors of the first paper wrote.

The second paper, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering and titled “STRAIGHT-IN Dual: a platform for dual single-copy integrations of DNA payloads and gene circuits into human induced pluripotent stem cells,” introduced STRAIGHT‑IN Dual, a platform that enables simultaneous, allele‑specific, single‑copy integration of two DNA constructs into hiPSCs. This system allowed the team to “investigate how promoter choice and gene syntax influence transgene silencing and how these design features affect reporter expression and forward programming of hiPSCs into neurons, motor neurons, and endothelial cells,” according to the authors of the second paper.

Using STRAIGHT‑IN Dual, the researchers also demonstrated a practical application: a divergent circuit expressing two components of a yellow fever antibody produced higher output than other configurations.

“This is really exciting because we can coordinate gene expression in ways that just weren’t possible before,” Galloway said. “Now that we understand the syntax, I think this will pave the way for us to program dynamic behaviors.

“If you want coordinated expression, a divergent circuit is great. If you want something that’s either/or, you can imagine using a convergent or tandem circuit, so when one turns on, the other turns off, and you can alternate pulses,” Galloway added.

The post Gene Syntax Determines DNA Supercoiling and Modulates Gene Expression appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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Optical Pooled CRISPR Screen Reveals Regulators of NF-κB Dynamics in Human Cells



Image of Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD

Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD

CSO
Myllia Biotechnology

Panelist

Image of Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, PhD

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.



Image of Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD

Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD

Director of Product Management
Element Biosciences

Panelist

Image of Jens Durruthy Durruthy, PhD

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:

Element Bio logo

The post Optical Pooled CRISPR Screen Reveals Regulators of NF-κB Dynamics in Human Cells appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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Opinion: Mifepristone court ruling makes drug development riskier for everyone

The biotech industry has long operated on a simple premise: FDA-regulated, evidence-based science determines how medicines reach patients, not litigation. That premise was already tested in an earlier Texas case challenging mifepristone’s Food and Drug Administration approval — an unprecedented effort to unwind decades of scientific review through the courts. It is now, once again, under strain.

On Friday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated an in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, a medication that has been used safely by millions for more than two decades. The drug manufacturer, Danco, appealed to the Supreme Court within hours and on Monday morning, SCOTUS granted one-week stay halting the order. In other words, mifepristone is available again through the mail and at pharmacies — but it’s unclear for how long that will be true. And it signals that even well-established, FDA-approved medicines are vulnerable to judicial override of FDA regulatory decisions.

Read the rest…

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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.” 

The post Big Tech Targets Drug Discovery with Wave of Life Science Platforms appeared first on GEN – Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

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STAT+: Biotech raises $42 million to run Huntington’s disease trial

Gene therapy startup Latus Bio has raised another $42 million to start its first clinical trials, where it will try to sidestep issues that have set back a more advanced competitor. 

Latus is moving two treatments through clinical trials this year. The first is for a form of Batten disease called CLN2 disease, a fatal genetic condition that causes seizures, vision loss, and cognitive problems. The company anticipates having initial clinical data by the end of the year. 

Now, Latus — founded by Beverly Davidson, chief scientific strategy officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — is turning its attention to a second drug candidate, a gene therapy for Huntington’s disease.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Opinion: STAT+: China’s strict new supply chain regulations could create massive problems for Western biopharma companies

A recently published paper delivers a finding that should be well known to every executive in Western pharma: China has gone from accounting for less than 8% of global clinical trials in 2010 to surpassing the United States in annual registered trial volume by 2020, reaching more than 5,000 trials per year in 2024. Eighty-eight percent of that growth, among private-sector sponsors, was driven by domestic Chinese firms, not multinationals relocating R&D.

China is not just a manufacturing base for the West’s drug supply chain. It is now a peer competitor in drug innovation — and it intends to stay that way on its own terms.

Toward that end, on April 7, China’s State Council issued Decree No. 834, the Regulations on Industrial and Supply Chain Security, effective immediately, with no transition period. Its 18 articles give Beijing sweeping new powers to investigate and sanction any foreign company whose commercial decisions are deemed to harm China’s industrial chain security. China’s 15th five-year plan has explicitly designated biotechnology and pharmaceuticals as the centerpiece of its next phase of industrial development. Decree No. 834 is the legal infrastructure through which Beijing intends to protect and leverage that ambition.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…