DIGITAL BIOLOGY
Features
Novo rebrands and expands AI drug discovery with Orbis, Ginkgo and Anthropic
Novo Nordisk adopted Novo as its day-to-day name, while retaining Novo Nordisk A/S as its legal name. Its Orbis deal targets oral macrocycles for cardiometabolic disease, with up to $1.4 billion in upfront and potential milestones, plus royalties. Separately, Ginkgo will build an autonomous lab at Novo's Waltham R&D site, while Anthropic will help it test Claude Science in research workflows. The announcements span AI-guided molecule design, laboratory automation and scientific reasoning.
Anthropic confirms a biology lab as it releases faster biomolecular modeling tools
Anthropic confirmed to Reuters that it operates a Bay Area wet lab, conducting biology experiments internally and with external partners. A spokesperson said the facility is not specifically for drug discovery. Separately, the company released optimized code for more than 30 biomolecular models, reporting roughly fourfold average speedups with slightly reduced numerical precision. It also announced an Adaptyv Bio competition with planned experimental testing of over 5,000 protein designs.
Therna releases Chronos RNA data to train and benchmark sequence-to-function models
Therna has released a representative study set from Chronos, the data engine behind its RNA-Logix platform. The company says Chronos measures RNA expression dynamics across many sequences and cellular contexts over time, providing data for training and evaluating sequence-to-function models. The release includes data on Hugging Face, a technical white paper and an interactive workspace. Experimental protocols, Therna's RNA foundation models and a separate human immune-cell study set remain proprietary.
Inductive launches Beacon-2, predicting human drug dose directly from chemical structure
The system combines predictions of potency and how a compound behaves in the body with mechanistic pharmacokinetic models to estimate an effective human dose. Inductive says Beacon-2 is available to partners through Compass and already runs on drug-discovery programs. In a separate agent-design exercise, it reports a 17-fold improvement in predicted dose across five design cycles, a computational result rather than a measured improvement in patients.
ByteDance's spun-off AI drug unit Anew Labs raises $290 million, sources say
Reuters reports that the Shanghai-based drug-discovery company completed its first external fundraising after being spun out of ByteDance. One person familiar with the transaction put its valuation at $1.5 billion. The financing details came from unnamed sources, rather than a company announcement; ByteDance and the investors did not immediately respond to Reuters.