DIGITAL BIOLOGY
Features
Anthropic's S-1 names life sciences a new market; it also disclosed buying one-person biotech Mithril
The filing says Claude is used in drug discovery and development, in a sector where annual global pharmaceutical spend is expected to exceed $2 trillion in 2026. The same week, Anthropic said it had acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company whose founder used Claude to run contracts, logistics and experiments across 11 external labs. Mithril took a possible muscular dystrophy treatment to promising mouse results in under 18 months; if its candidates hold up, Anthropic expects human trials as soon as late 2028.
Formation Bio launches a $600 million fund to buy and develop clinical-stage drug programs
Formation Bio, an AI-native pharmaceutical company, plans to acquire 10 to 15 drug programs over the next 3 to 5 years and take them through key clinical milestones. Its limited partners include research foundations, endowments, hospitals and philanthropic organizations, and Formation Bio has committed its own capital. Each program sits in its own corporate entity.
China Life Capital leads BioGeometry's Series A extension, bringing total Series A funding past $100 million
BioGeometry builds what it calls world models: GeoFlow for molecules and GeoCell for cells. It says GeoFlow V3, which refines designs through in silico evolution, reached an average hit rate of nearly 20% across more than 20 targets and cut lead discovery to under three weeks. Several of its bispecific antibody programs are expected to reach the IND stage in 2027.
Parse Biosciences and Nomic Bio will build Cascade, a 100 million cell immune dataset for licensing
Cascade pairs 100 million single-cell RNA-seq profiles with more than 11,000 proteomic secretome profiles, across over 150,000 individual and combinatorial cytokine and drug perturbation conditions. The companies pitch it as training data for virtual cell models. GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, Graph Therapeutics and Turbine have already committed as foundational partners.
Flagship merges Cellarity, Etiome and Empress Therapeutics into one AI drug discovery company, Etcelera
Etcelera combines human transcriptomic data, chemoproteomics and perturbation data generation with Flagship's in-house AI, including a foundation model trained on data from 150 million cells, to find new targets and develop small molecules. It launches with programs in hematology, metabolism and immunology. Cellarity's clinical-stage small molecule CLY-124 moves to a separate asset company.