DIGITAL BIOLOGY
Features
Radical Numerics adapts multimodal Omnii model for personalized cancer-vaccine design
Radical Numerics post-trained Omnii, a model pretrained across DNA, RNA, epigenomics, protein sequences and protein structure, for personalized cancer-vaccine design. Its demonstrated workflow ranks tumor-derived immune targets and designs an mRNA sequence to encode them. The company reports stronger immunogenicity predictions than specialized tools on public benchmarks, while cautioning that the datasets are small and heterogeneous. The system is in early access; the results do not establish that its designs produce better vaccines in patients.
Insilico Medicine doses first patient in Phase III trial of rentosertib for IPF
After last week's exploratory aging-clock study, rentosertib has reached a separate milestone: Insilico says it has dosed the first patient in its Phase III trial for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. The 52-week study plans to enroll 320 patients across 47 centers in China. Its primary endpoint is the annual rate of decline in forced vital capacity. The drug remains investigational; starting Phase III does not establish efficacy.
Google DeepMind releases AlphaGenome Atlas predicting effects of 9 billion DNA variants
The atlas is free for academic use through a web portal and API; commercial access via Google Cloud is planned. DeepMind says the 1-petabyte dataset is more than 30 times larger than the AlphaFold Database. It pairs the data with a new AlphaGenome Variant Impact score that combines AlphaGenome and AlphaMissense predictions into a single number for ranking variants. A University of Exeter researcher used it to find 22% more non-coding genetic associations in a UK Biobank analysis of over 54,000 participants.
Ginkgo Bioworks wins ARPA-H subcontract to automate individualized RNA drug manufacturing
ESCALATOR is a benchtop system meant to turn an RNA sequence into a quality-released, patient-scale drug product, and Ginkgo's subcontract under ARPA-H's GIVE program is worth up to $17.5 million. Ginkgo, a subcontractor to prime contractor Waterfall Scientific, is building the automation hardware and extending its Catalyst software to make the system's manufacturing modules and analytical instruments operate as one controlled unit. The consortium is starting with a design and engineering phase, with a technical kickoff expected later this month.
Schrödinger co-founds Tectora Therapeutics with two immunology programs for equity, milestones and royalties
Tectora, co-founded with New Enterprise Associates and RA Capital Management, closed a $55 million Series A from the two investors. Tectora will use Schrödinger's drug discovery team and computational platform to advance the two early-stage small molecule programs, SDGR-4594 and SDGR-8139, toward clinical candidates. Schrödinger says its past spinout partnerships have collectively generated over $750 million in proceeds.