Hello, my fellow horticulturists

This week is a mixed flower bed: pioneering womb surgery gives babies born with abdominal defects a chance to blossom, AstraZeneca sprawls across the oncology space with a Bristol Myers Squibb merger, scientists have pup-agated canines that won’t have you reaching for antihistamines, a breakthrough MND treatment takes root in human trials, and some deadly plants turn out to have a healing streak.

Keep digging for cures!

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👶 Woman has pioneering womb surgery to fix ‘miracle’ baby with intestines outside its body (BBC News): A British baby became the third in the world to undergo pioneering surgery in the womb to treat complex gastroschisis, a life-threatening abdominal wall defect in which the bowel develops outside the body. Doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital used keyhole foetal surgery at 26 weeks’ gestation to push baby Theo’s organs back into his abdomen; Theo was delivered successfully in February.

Our take: By correcting complex gastroschisis before birth, the procedure could dramatically shorten or eliminate neonatal intensive care stays that, in the most complex cases, can run to six months, requiring multiple surgeries and prolonged IV feeding. Michael Belfort, the surgeon who led the trial, thinks the innovative technique opens up the womb as a surgical space more broadly, noting that both cardiac and lung operations could potentially be performed in utero.

🤑 AstraZeneca falls to third-largest UK company amid US merger talks (The Guardian): AstraZeneca’s shares fell sharply this week after reports that it is in talks to merge with Bristol Myers Squibb, in a deal that could value the combined companies at nearly $400B. The takeover would create the world’s fourth-largest drugmaker by market capitalisation and result in a major expansion of AstraZeneca’s stateside presence, but the move is set to draw regulatory scrutiny given the overlap between the two firms’ oncology portfolios.

Our take: For three years, AstraZeneca has built its pipeline cheaply, licensing drugs from Chinese biotechs for small sums upfront and paying the rest only if they work. Bristol Myers Squibb is the opposite kind of bet: a $133B company with a shrinking growth outlook and a run of patent expiries ahead of it. AstraZeneca is forecast to post double-digit earnings growth through 2030 on its own, and analysts are struggling to see the rationale for this mega-merger proposal.

🐕 Fur real: Biotech startup eliminates major dog allergen in beagle pups using CRISPR (GEN): A New York start-up has used CRISPR to breed two beagle puppies that no longer produce Can f 1, a small lipocalin protein linked to sneezing, itchy eyes, rashes and asthma. The two new pups, Alfie and Bailey, are now nearly two years old, healthy, and behaviourally normal. This development opens the door to dogs that don’t trigger allergies, shifting treatment from managing people’s immune response to removing the allergen at source.

Our take: They may be man’s best friend, but one in seven people worldwide are allergic to our canine pals. Knocking out Can f 1 should take the edge off most reactions, though it is the dominant allergen rather than the only one, so these dogs are not fully hypoallergenic. The researchers now hope to scale their work safely into secondary allergens and other breeds, with a focus on creating allergy-safe companion and service animals.

💊 MND drug entering human trials could help 97% of sufferers (The Times): A new drug for motor neurone disease is set to enter human trials. Developed from UCL research, TRCN-1023 helps cells restore production of UNC13A, a protein vital for communication between motor neurones and muscles. While it is not a cure, researchers hope it could slow disease progression and offer one of the most broadly applicable MND treatments developed in years.

Our take: Up until now, MND drug development has mostly focused on small genetic subgroups; tofersen, the first MND drug licensed in the UK in decades, works only for the roughly 2% of patients with SOD1 mutations. TRCN-1023, on the other hand, targets a protein shortfall found in 97% of cases, so it could impact far more people. However, the drug’s value will depend heavily on how early patients receive it, potentially adding pressure on diagnosis and testing, and making earlier detection as important as the treatment itself.

And finally…

💐 Deadly flowers may unlock the secret to synthesising potent new medicines (BioTechniques): Scientists have uncovered six enzymes that help two highly poisonous plants – wolfsbane and larkspur – produce atisinium, a complex alkaloid with potential applications in pain, malaria and cancer treatment. By recreating parts of the pathway in tobacco plants, the team has taken an important step towards producing these hard-to-make compounds more sustainably, turning nature’s chemical weapons into possible starting points for new medicines.

Our take: Atisinium belongs to the diterpenoid alkaloids, a family that has long interested drug developers but whose structural complexity has made the compounds very difficult to synthesise chemically. Rebuilding the pathway in tobacco turns the plants into a research platform where the six enzymes can be tested, tweaked and used to explore related compounds long before anyone attempts production at scale.

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🧠 Gain Therapeutics: a first-in-class, disease-modifying therapy for Parkinson’s: Gene Mack discusses his journey from biochemistry and Wall Street to biotech leadership.

🕵️ Nick Myerberg, partner and Head of AI at Braidwell on AI’s next era in drug discovery: The episode examines why AI has yet to deliver approved medicines, and what separates a durable platform from the hype.

💊 A rescue model for shelved drug candidates with Annette Bakker, PhD and Andrew Lo, PhD: The duo discuss how shelved medicines can be matched with new developers and funding, using Gomekli’s route from an abandoned Pfizer candidate to an approved NF1 therapy.

Apply ✍️

💬 Global Brand Communications, Astellas Pharma: Are you skilled at turning complex scientific, medical and business information into clear brand communications? This UK-based role will involve shaping global strategies and advising cross-functional brand teams.

🧑‍⚕️ Director of Statistical Science – Global Medical Affairs/Payer Biometrics, AstraZeneca: Do you know your way around oncology statistics, real-world evidence and payer strategies? This position will entail managing and developing a global team of statisticians, shaping study design and quantitative decision-making.

🧪 Senior Director, Biologics Platform Technologies Head, GSK: Experienced in industrialising biologics manufacturing technologies at scale? In this senior leadership role, you will shape global platform strategy and oversee technology transfers.

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🧑‍🔬 10-13.08 | The Bioprocessing Summit 2026 | Boston, USA: A global meeting for bioprocessing scientists, engineers and industry leaders across biologics, cell and gene therapy, RNA and emerging modalities.

🧬 20-21.08 | 15th International Conference on Biotechnology | London, UK: Explore advances in genetic engineering, tissue engineering, microbial biotechnology, biofabrication, nanobiotechnology and pharmaceutical innovation.

💡 24.08 | BioTech Startups, Investors, Innovators & Professionals Networking Event | London, UK: An evening bringing together biotech founders, investors, researchers and industry professionals to build connections, share ideas and explore new opportunities for collaboration across biotechnology and life sciences.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor-ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Ahoy, my seafaring sleuths,

The waters are busy this week: COVID’s immune legacy resurfaces for a second deployment, the vagus nerve is mapped for the first time, an inhaled drug finds its sea legs in bronchiectasis, FDA advisers crack open the peptide hatch, and federal marshals board a sailboat off New Jersey to find someone who has been hiding in plain sight for 21 years.

Anchors aweigh,

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Genomic medicine off the shelf: LNPs as a platform for interchangeable, personalised molecules.

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🦠 New cancer vaccine harnesses COVID-19 immune memory to fight tumours (News Medical): A Cleveland team at Celloram, University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve has developed a dendritic cell vaccine that leverages residual immunity to the COVID Spike protein. PROTEXI pairs tumour antigens with Spike fragments, so that the helper T-cells (CD4+) a patient already carries can recruit killer T-cells (CD8+) against the cancer. The target is “immune-cold” tumours, which evade immune recognition and against which cancer vaccines have long struggled. In mice, PROTEXI slowed melanoma and breast tumour growth, and improved survival.

Our take: Nothing else in modern medicine comes close to the scale of shared immune memory the pandemic left behind, and very few people have worked out what to do with it. Celloram’s answer is cancer, but logic suggests that if a Spike epitope can lend help to a tumour antigen, it could do so for any target too weak to elicit help on its own. A human trial in sarcoma is up next.

🫁 Revagenix doses first Participant in Phase 1 Trial of Rev-56, an inhaled therapy for non-CF bronchiectasis (BioSpace): Up to half a million American adults live with non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis, but there is no approved therapy for the Pseudomonas aeruginosa driving their flare-ups and hospital admissions, so clinicians fall back on off-label antibiotics. Revagenix has dosed the first participant in a Phase 1 trial of Rev-56, an inhaled antibacterial designed to fill that gap. The two-part trial covers both healthy volunteers and patients with confirmed P. aeruginosa infection, with the first topline data due by year-end.

Our take: Rev-56 works by inhibiting LpxC, an enzyme that Gram-negative bacteria need to build their outer membrane. Companies Achaogen and Recida have also had a crack at it, but both abandoned their candidates in Phase 1 after their circulating drugs raised cardiovascular safety concerns. Rev-56 aims to overcome this by not circulating at all; bronchiectasis is an airway infection, so inhaling the drug gets it directly to the bacteria without entering the bloodstream.

🩻 Comprehensive human vagus nerve map unveiled (GEN): 30 donors, 60 nerves, and three years of microCT imaging have produced what Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes call the first comprehensive anatomical map of the human vagus nerve, the sprawling cranial nerve running from brainstem to gut. Each nerve carries roughly 100,000 fibres, some half a micrometre across. The $6.7 million NIH-funded dataset is now free on SPARC Science for anyone building neuromodulation devices.

Our take: Vagus nerve stimulation has become a wellness category, sold through breathing apps, cold plunges and ear clips. But even clinical devices – such as the rheumatoid arthritis implant the FDA approved in July 2025 – stimulate the whole trunk, which increases the risk of unwanted effects. A fibre-level reference map finally makes targeted stimulation possible.

💊 FDA advisers narrowly vote to add 6 peptides to a drug compounding list. What’s next? (ABC News): A committee of outside advisers to the FDA has recommended adding six peptides, including BPC-157, to the controlled list of ingredients compounding pharmacies may use, overruling the agency’s own scientists who opposed all seven under consideration on the grounds of thin trial data and possible immune reactions. The peptides – none of which are FDA-approved as medicines – are promoted for a wide range of uses, including muscle growth and fat loss. Scientists worry this will confuse consumers, who may mistake a place on the compounding list for medical approval.

Our take: The committee’s recommendation was based on harm reduction; Americans buy peptides online anyway, so a pharmacy is safer than an unknown vendor. While that’s not a bad argument, it’s worth asking who stands to gain from wider access, especially since panellists included people who work for peptide businesses and clinics – appointments that FDA officials reportedly questioned as the panel was being assembled. The agency is not bound by the recommendation, though it usually follows such advice.

And finally…

⛵ In the biotech industry, a most-wanted fugitive was long hiding in plain sight (STAT News): Federal marshals boarded a 56-foot sailboat off New Jersey this month, arresting the man Immix Biopharma had until recently employed as its chief medical officer. Richard Graydon was the most recent of many aliases used by Ronald Fischer, 70, a former anaesthesiologist who failed to appear at his Rhode Island trial in 2005 and was convicted in absentia of first-degree sexual assault. He had already lost his medical licence in the 1990s, after pleading guilty to assault in an earlier case.

Our take: Companies associated with Graydon/Fischer are now distancing themselves from him. Atossa, which named him interim CMO in 2022, now says he was a contractor for less than two weeks; J&J says he was never an employee; and Immix fired him the day after news of his capture broke – for reasons, it told financial regulators, unrelated to his activities at the company. This is a pertinent reminder to employers that due diligence matters, and that scrutiny ought to rise with seniority, not the other way round.

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What The Health With Emily Casey: A brand new podcast bringing together healthcare founders, clinicians, investors and operators for candid and occasionally unruly conversations.

Longevity Treatments – Snake Oil or Breakthrough? John Newman & Mahtab Jafari: Longevity researchers rate the current evidence for metformin, rapamycin, NAD+, GLP-1s and more, asking what would it take for any of them to gain regulatory approval for healthspan indications?

Astrocytes Respond to Stress and Affect Anxiety, Synaptic Plasticity and Memory: Neuroscientist Ciaran Murphy-Royal explains how a single astrocyte can interact with thousands of neurons at once, and how astrocyte networks regulate anxiety and fear responses.

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🩺 Associate Medical Director, Safety Evaluation and Risk Management, GSK: Got the clinical judgement to steer pharmacovigilance strategy at a global pharma? You’ll lead signal detection, author periodic safety reports and RMPs, and drive evidence-based risk decisions across GSK’s clinical development and post-marketing portfolio.

🧬 Laboratory Technician, MolBreeding Biotechnology: Handy with a sequencer? You’ll perform NGS workflows from DNA extraction through library preparation to sequencer operation, run genotyping assays, and keep reagent inventory ticking over.

🌱 Plant Physiology Scientist, Wild Bio: Want to teach crops to outperform half a billion years of evolution? You’ll design large-scale photosynthesis phenotyping studies, build proprietary datasets, and translate physiological insights into yield traits.

RSVP 📆

🧑‍🔬 10-13.08 | The Bioprocessing Summit 2026 | Boston, USA: A major global meeting for bioprocessing scientists, engineers and industry leaders, covering process development, scale-up, quality and analytics across biologics, cell and gene therapy, RNA and emerging modalities.

💡 24.08 | BioTech Startups, Investors, Innovators & Professionals Networking Event | London, UK: An evening for biotech founders, investors, researchers and industry professionals to make connections, share ideas and find new collaborators across the life sciences.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor-ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, cellular zombie slayers,

This week, Andy Burnham isn’t the only one with reasons to be cheerful as the UK enjoys a biotech funding boom, AstraZeneca is taking a gamble on rare diseases, brain remodelling in teenage mice could guide mental illness treatment, Donald Trump is slapping 100% tariffs on generics, and the removal of ‘senescent’ zombie cells could improve the ageing process.

Until the next resurrection.

Dodo

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🇬🇧 UK biotech venture investment reaches five-year high at over £2B in Q2 (UKTN): UK biotech is riding a major funding wave, driven largely by Isomorphic Labs’ £1.6B mega-round. Even without this outlier, venture capital nearly doubled year-on-year to £498M, underlining broad-based investor confidence across the sector. The UK now captures 61% of Europe’s total VC investment, cementing its spot as the continent’s top biotech hub, with strong activity across seed, Series A and later-stage rounds.

Our take: The headline growth masks a heavy concentration of capital; strip out Isomorphic Labs, and the underlying funding base is still fairly thin, even if it’s moving in the right direction. This raises questions about how deep and resilient the UK biotech capital pool really is, and whether the ecosystem is overly reliant on a small number of breakout AI-driven companies to sustain momentum.

🤑 AstraZeneca highlights rare diseases in $80B revenue push (The FT): Alexion, AstraZeneca’s US-based rare disease subsidiary, is betting that rare diseases could be a major growth engine for the company. CEO Marc Dunoyer notes 95% of the 10,000 known rare diseases still lack an approved treatment, leaving huge room for scientific and commercial progress. Alexion now contributes 16% of AstraZeneca’s revenue and will expand into 80 countries, making it central to the company’s push towards $80B in sales by 2030.

Our take: AstraZeneca’s gamble is on its ability to make rare-disease access work across very different and highly fragmented healthcare and payer systems. Expanding into 80 countries turns rare disease into a serious market-shaping exercise, where local reimbursement, evidence thresholds and treatment pathways may matter as much as the science itself.

🧠 Memory shaped by brain remodelling during adolescence in mice (GEN): Adolescent memories may not disappear; they may simply become harder to access. US researchers found that in mice, a brain region responsible for established memories temporarily remodels during late adolescence, weakening the structures that keep memory circuits stable. The study suggests adolescence may be a true remodelling phase for memory, and could help explain why memory, mood and mental health risks all shift during this period.

Our take: That the remodelling is confined to the retrosplenial cortex, sparing the hippocampus entirely, points to something more specific than generalised adolescent brain chaos – a deliberate, targeted process with its own timing. Given this window overlaps with when schizophrenia and depression typically first appear, individual variation in this remodelling schedule might one day tell us who’s vulnerable, long before any psychiatric symptoms surface.

🇺🇸 US generic tariff reprieve on the rocks as Trump proposes 100% rate in 2028 (Pharmaceutical Technology): Trump is threatening to slap generic drugs entering the US with a 100% tariff from August 2028, doubling to 200% a year later, unless manufacturers relocate production stateside. Generic medicines make up around 90% of US prescriptions, and more than half of their active ingredients are sourced from India and Europe, leaving both regions especially exposed should the plan go ahead.

Our take: Moving final assembly onto US soil doesn’t automatically build a domestic supply chain. Generic manufacturing still depends on globally sourced active ingredients, chemicals, packaging and specialist equipment, most of which will keep coming from India, China and Europe regardless of where the pills get pressed. Unless the policy also addresses these upstream dependencies, Washington risks satisfying political demands for domestic production without removing the vulnerabilities behind shortages.

And finally…

🧟 Restoring ability to remove zombie cells may keep us sharp as we age (The New Scientist): Scientists have found a way to restore the body’s own ability to clear senescent ‘zombie’ cells, rather than destroying them outright. Stanford researchers blocked a receptor called EP2 on tissue-resident macrophages in older mice, restoring their ability to clear out worn-out neutrophils. The treated mice showed sharper memory, less inflammation and better mobility, hinting that ageing may be partly driven by a fixable immune-system glitch.

Our take: The improvements across memory, inflammation, muscle loss, fat accumulation and mobility suggest that impaired macrophage clearance could sit upstream of several age-related problems: senescent neutrophils can accumulate, fuelling chronic inflammation that ripples out into frailty and cognitive decline. Rather than treating these as separate conditions, future therapies might instead target the shared biological mechanism underneath them.

Tune in 🎧

💰 How BIO-Europe is expanding beyond dealmaking in 2026: The 2026 event will introduce new tracks covering regulatory strategy, clinical development and manufacturing.

💬 Robert Jacks, CEO of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals | precision medicine, biotech strategy & leadership: Robert discusses his journey from engineering into the C-suite, and why strategic clarity, empathy and disciplined capital allocation matter more than chasing acquisitions.

🧠 Late-stage development and commercial planning with CervoMed’s Matt Winton: The episode covers neflamapimod’s path through late-stage trials for dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), including manufacturing scale-up, regulatory alignment, payer engagement and launch planning.

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🎩 Senior Director, Translational & Clinical Omics, Novo Nordisk Global: Interested in shaping how genomics, bioinformatics and AI inform medicine development? This global leadership role will define the long-term omics strategy, and turn complex clinical and translational data into insights that support R&D decisions.

🤝 Senior Engagement Manager, Phastar: Experienced in managing complex life sciences projects and keeping customers at the centre? This fully remote role will oversee oncology and rare disease studies, and build strong client relationships across the UK, Spain, France or South Africa.

💊 Strategic Deployment Manager, Life Science, Schrödinger: Keen on helping pharma teams adopt advanced computational drug discovery tools? This role will lead customer deployments of the Schrödinger Platform from project scoping through to long-term adoption.

RSVP 📆

🧑‍🔬 10-13.08 | The Bioprocessing Summit 2026 | Boston, USA: A major global meeting for bioprocessing scientists, engineers and industry leaders, covering process development, scale-up, quality and analytics across biologics, cell and gene therapy, RNA and emerging modalities.

🧬 20-21.08 | 15th International Conference on Biotechnology | London, UK: The meeting explores advances in genetic engineering, tissue engineering, microbial biotechnology, biofabrication, nanobiotechnology and pharmaceutical innovation.

💡 24.08 | BioTech Startups, Investors, Innovators & Professionals Networking Event | London, UK: An evening bringing together biotech founders, investors, researchers and industry professionals to build connections, share ideas and explore new opportunities for collaboration across biotechnology and life sciences.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow venture capitalists,

This week: tick-borne nairoviruses have found a new way to dodge human immune signals, an Apple Tree partner has been ordered to hand over control of the biotech venture fund, biotech IPOs in H1 2026 have already beaten 2025’s year-total tally, Harvard hosts the world’s largest longevity conference, and German researchers discover that bacteria will hoover up dissolved uranium if you give them a glycerol snack.

Don’t forget to read the small print!

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🪲 Tick-borne nairoviruses use OTU proteases to evade human antiviral signals (GEN): Scientists studying the not-so-humble tick have discovered a new pathogenic concern: nairoviruses. These RNA viruses, spread by ticks in Asia, Europe, Africa and the US, can cause high fevers, severe headaches, and organ dysfunction in humans. The researchers examined four emerging nairoviruses – SGLV, TTV1, YEZV, and PCTNV – revealing that the enzyme ovarian tumour protease (OTU) strips away the protein tags ubiquitin and ISG15, which activate human immune responses. PCTNV, carried by ticks on the Pacific Coast, had the strongest immune-dodging effect.

Our take: Each summer, it seems we are at the mercy of new tick-borne diseases and scientists are not resting on their laurels (Editor’s note: I cannot find out if Dodos carried ticks, but feathered dinosaurs certainly did!) In this study, the team resolved high‑resolution crystal structures of several OTU proteases, in order to train computational models and predict the threat of emerging nairoviruses before they spread. The research paints a compelling picture of tick diversity; it’s not just Lyme disease we should be looking out for!

⚖️ Judge orders Apple Tree partner to forfeit oversight of venture fund (BioPharma Dive): A Cayman Islands court has ordered Seth Harrison, general partner of biotech VC Apple Tree Partners, to hand control of the fund to two court-appointed directors. The ruling caps a year-long legal fight with primary backer Rigmora – tied to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev – which pledged $1.5B to ATP back in 2012. A parallel US bankruptcy case rumbles on, with Harrison himself emerging as a bidder for ATP’s portfolio companies.

Our take: Spare a thought for the biotechs caught in the middle. ATP’s portfolio companies – including Red Queen Therapeutics and Ascidian Therapeutics – all have staff and patients relying on funding that’s now tied up in a boardroom fight. Just last year, Delaware courts sided with ATP, ordering Rigmora to pay roughly $97M to meet its capital commitments to its startups. Let’s hope the science survives the litigation.

📈 Biotech IPOs surge in H1 of 2026, shattering records and doubling last year’s total (BioSpace): 18 biotechs went public in the first half of 2026, already more than double 2025’s rather meagre total of eight. Two of them, obesity player Kailera and peptide outfit Parabilis, set new records for the largest biotech IPO ever, at $625M and $670M respectively. Of the US contingent, seven (of 13) have already shown strong performance, with hair-loss biotech Veradermics leading the way – up a jolly 550% since its February debut.

Our take: 2026 looks set to become biotech’s strongest IPO year since the market highs of the COVID-19 pandemic (2021 produced around 100 IPOs). Two biotechs hoping to join the IPO bandwagon are CRISPR engineers Scribe Therapeutics – despite only having one candidate in the clinic – and metabolic upstart Kalohexis, which has two lead assets for durable weight loss and cancer cachexia in clinical trials.

🎓 Harvard University hosts the world’s largest conference dedicated to longevity biotechnology (News Medical): The ‘13th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting’ lands at Harvard in October, kicking off Boston Longevity Week. Organised by Insilico Medicine, the meeting’s headline sponsor is Eli Lilly, with AbbVie, BioAge, and Morgan Stanley rounding out the sponsor list. Tracks span clinical development, AI drug discovery, and future tech, with executives from ten of the world’s largest pharma companies confirmed to speak.

Our take: No longer just the domain of health-maxxers (this old Dodo prays this is a phrase!), longevity science has transitioned from trendy buzzword to a multi-billion-dollar category. At last year’s conference, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk proposed that GLP-1 agonists may well be the first longevity drugs (read the article in Nature Biotechnology). With a slew of pharma companies now developing longevity programs across areas such as fibrosis, anti-muscle-wasting and cellular rejuvenation, who knows what headlines will emerge this year.

And finally…

☢️ Bacteria turn dissolved uranium into stable compound in 130 days, study finds (Phys.org): Give a microbe a glycerol snack, and it will hoover up radioactive waste in water. That’s the finding of German and Spanish researchers, who fed the stuff to bugs living in water from a flooded mine in the Ore Mountains. 130 days later, 95% of the dissolved uranium had been packed away into their cell walls as FeU(V)O4, a rare pentavalent compound thought to be atmospherically stable.

Our take: These chemical findings have obvious environmental implications, and the authors plan to investigate the extent to which bacteria might help render toxic uranium harmless for remediation purposes. By mimicking a deep mine’s natural low-oxygen conditions, the team has a lead on what might trigger the same reaction in the wild – without needing to tip glycerol into a mine by the tanker-load.

Tune in 🎧

💾 The birth, evolution, and future of microchips: Follow the microchip’s journey from 1950s origins to cornerstone of global technology, economics, and geopolitics, and what semiconductors will shape next.

🕵️ You have plenty to hide from AI: AI has dissolved the friction that once made mass surveillance data practically harmless, putting cheaply available personal data within easy reach of governments, foreign powers, and ad brokers.

🏘️ The data centre next door: Environmental health scientist Jacoby Wilson explains how data centres bring noise, water consumption, and rising utility bills disproportionately to working-class neighbourhoods, and what regulatory tools could push back.

Apply ✍️

🧬 Scientist/Senior Scientist, Therapeutic Antibody Discovery, Maxion Therapeutics: Keen to engineer antibodies against targets the industry has struggled with for decades? You’ll run KnotBody selection campaigns against ion channel and GPCR antigens, and conduct screening for binding and functional properties.

🖥️ Data Scientist, Portal Biotech: Fancy hunting proteins at the single-molecule level? You’ll develop statistical and ML pipelines for nanopore-based proteomic data, iterate from exploratory analysis to deployable components, and collaborate closely with the wet lab team.

🎗️ Group Leader, Antibody Screening and Pharmacology, Cancer Research UK: Ready to lead the team triaging tomorrow’s cancer antibodies? You’ll oversee pharmacological screening, define candidate selection strategies across bispecifics, ADCs and T-cell engagers, and drive scientific leadership.

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💡 22.07 | Startup Lab x Specialist Briefings: AI Innovation vs. Regulation - Is the UK Falling Behind or Playing it Safe? | London, UK: An evening panel with Curistica, Aival, ZINC and RADIANT picking apart whether the UK’s regulatory posture on digital health is a prudent guardrail or growth-throttling bureaucracy.

It seems that the fledglings have begun to fly the nest this summer and are having a well-earned break, which means we’re all quiet on the event front. However, get in touch if you know of any upcoming biotech events that should be on our radar! Post an event here

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, it’s been a rather buggy week in the world of biotech.

This week, Novartis gets the chequebook out for up-and-coming British biotech Myricx Bio; Boston’s biotech hub hits the skids as new contenders emerge; depressed hippies everywhere are finally vindicated as psychedelics prove their mettle against treatment-resistant depression, asthmatic mice breathe easier thanks to a nifty new allergen treatment, and cyborg cockroaches don tiny diving suits to explore disaster zones.

It turns out these bugs have more to offer than getting your local kebab shop shut down.

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🇨🇭 Swiss drugmaker Novartis buys UK biotech firm in $1.5bn deal (The Times): Myricx Bio, an Imperial College and Francis Crick Institute spinout, has been snapped up by Novartis, marking one of the UK biotech sector’s cleaner pre-clinical exits. Founded in 2019, the company develops next-generation payloads – the warhead, in ADC parlance – designed to deliver a targeted cancer-killing payload directly into tumours. Its NMT inhibitor platform tackles the resistance and toxicity that limit current ADCs.

Our take: Myricx’s sale at a pre-clinical stage says rather a lot about the limits of Europe’s biotech scaling model. The company had credible backing, a £90 million Series A led by Novo Holdings and Abingworth, a high-quality syndicate by any standard. Yet even with that support behind it, the exit came before any clinical data emerged, precisely where valuations tend to inflect most sharply.

🏙️ Beyond Boston: Unlikely cities stake biotech claims (BiopharmaDive): Lancaster County is perhaps better known for horse-drawn buggies and Amish country than antibody manufacturing, but a new wave of unexpected US life sciences hubs are gaining ground. Lancaster is leaning on GSK’s $800 million expansion, Oklahoma City on federal funding, and Las Vegas on lower operating costs and a fresh 120,000 sq ft incubator from Roseman University of Health Sciences.

Our take: These emerging hubs are being catalysed by coordinated public investment rather than traditional venture capital, from Pennsylvania’s backing of GSK and Eurofins to federal funding pouring into Oklahoma. This signals a different model of biotech cluster formation, where government-led industrial strategy plays a larger role in de-risking infrastructure and early ecosystem buildout, particularly outside established VC-heavy regions.

🧠 Compass’ psilocybin depression drug works for the long haul (BioSpace): Compass Pathways has strengthened its case for the first FDA-approved psilocybin therapy, with Phase 3 data showing rapid and durable benefits in treatment-resistant depression. In the latest trial, 39% of patients saw meaningful improvement within 6 weeks of 2 doses, most of those gains holding through 6 months, and nearly 30% of initial responders later reaching full remission. Psychedelics could be genuine challengers to staples like SSRIs.

Our take: If approved, COMP360 may not be constrained by patient demand or clinical efficacy, but by the sheer logistics of delivery. Unlike pills, psychedelic therapies require hours-long supervised sessions, trained staff, and specialised settings. That makes delivery inherently capacity-limited. A single patient can occupy a room and a clinician for most of a working day, sharply constraining how many patients a site can treat.

🐭 Chimeric allergen receptor treg cells suppress allergic asthma in mice (GEN): Researchers in Lausanne have borrowed the architecture of cancer immunotherapy and pointed it in the opposite direction, engineering immune cells to switch off allergic responses rather than switch them on. Regulatory T cells equipped with chimeric allergen receptors suppressed and even prevented asthma symptoms in mice. By precisely targeting the allergen, the engineered Tregs restore immune tolerance rather than simply turning the whole system down.

Our take: Most allergy treatments either block parts of the inflammatory cascade or gradually expose the body to an allergen until the immune response becomes less reactive. By arming Tregs with receptors that recognise birch pollen, the therapy is designed to intervene only when the relevant allergen appears. If this approach translates, it could shift allergy treatment away from blanket suppression and towards something closer to programmable tolerance.

And finally…

🪳 World’s first ‘diving suits’ for cockroaches (The Naked Scientist): The cockroach – evolution’s most resilient nuisance – has now been kitted out with a 3D-printed scuba backpack that generates oxygen from hydrogen peroxide, extending its underwater survival from a few minutes to up to three hours. Scientists in Singapore steer the insects remotely by stimulating their nervous systems, sending them through tight, debris-filled spaces in disaster zones where conventional robots cannot follow.

Our take: Sending a robot into a flooded tunnel raises no particular ethical questions. Sending a living animal – surgically modified, remotely steered, dispatched into a potentially lethal environment – is rather a different matter. The researchers frame the cockroach as a platform, but it remains an organism, and existing animal research frameworks were not written with this in mind. Nobody has quite decided what it is, which means nobody has decided who is responsible for it.

Tune in 🎧

🧑‍🔬 The first PROTAC is here. What comes next in protein degradation? President and CEO of Arvinas explains how PROTAC protein degradation uses the body’s own disposal system to eliminate disease-causing proteins, and why the first Phase 3 success for a PROTAC could mark a new chapter in drug design.

🤑 BoB@BIO: Biotech investing and deals: Executive Partner, Private Equity, at Sofinnova Maha Radhakrishnan discusses the move from pharma to investing, what makes late-stage asset deals work, and how China-originated programmes are reshaping development timelines.

🥼 Hosts chat with Riley Elmer: Tips and tricks to improving scientific presentations: This week’s guest shares her practical advice for making scientific presentations clearer, more engaging, and more memorable, from building better slides and tailoring complex research for different audiences.

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💰 Manager, BioPharma Business Development (EMEA), Foundation Medicine: Interested in helping pharma and biotech partners make better use of genomic insights? You’ll drive account growth, shape biopharma partnerships, and connect partners with FMI’s NGS assays.

🧪 Business Development Manager (Pharma/Biotech), Biosynth: Passionate about turning pharma and biotech prospects into long-term clients? You’ll lead sales from prospecting to close, build industry networks, negotiate contracts, and work with marketing and BD teams to spot new opportunities.

💂 London Account Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Keen on helping leading research institutions advance their science? You’ll manage key accounts including the Francis Crick, QMUL and Southampton University, build lasting customer relationships, and grow revenue through consultative selling.

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💡 13.07 | BioTech Startups, Investors, Innovators & Professionals Networking Event | London, UK: An evening networking event for biotech founders, investors, researchers and industry professionals, with one-minute elevator pitches, investor access and opportunities to build strategic partnerships across pharma, biotech and life sciences.

🤑 14.07 | Bionow Business Pitching 2026 | Warrington, UK: A morning event bringing together innovative businesses, investors and collaborators from across the North of England, with 90-second pitches, emerging technology showcases and opportunities to build new sector partnerships.

🩸 16.07 | MedTech Careers AHEAD 2026 Edition | London, UK: A careers-focused medtech event at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, bringing together students, early-career professionals and sector voices to explore routes into medical technology and healthcare innovation.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Welcome to the knockout rounds,

This week, it’s all kicking off: Cambridge scientists have base-edited a master regulator out of team of human embryos, Salk Institute researchers found that iron plays a long game before neurons finally give in, Beeline added $126M to its immunology war chest, Ipsen paid up to $1.7B to sign Kartos’s myelofibrosis therapy, and Saudi Arabia is warming up for the the 2034 World Cup, instigating a biotech line-up for September’s Riyadh Global Medical Biotechnology Summit.

Catch you at half-time,

Dodo

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🥇 World-first gene editing application unveils master regulator of human embryo development (BioTechniques): Cambridge researchers, led by Kathy Niakan, have used adenine base editing to disable a crucial DNA-binding transcription factor in human embryos. It’s the first time the technique has been let loose on a developmental regulator in humans. Losing the pluripotency gene wrecked epiblast specification and sent cells hurtling toward primitive endoderm or trophectoderm instead. The approach caused no genotoxicity and showed rather limited off-target editing.

Our take: Niakan’s 2017 paper documented that CRISPR in human embryos reliably caused chromosome loss, precisely why embryo genome editing has spent years in the naughty corner. Base editing swaps one nucleotide for another without going near a double-strand cut, sidestepping it all. It is the first time base editing has probed gene function in human embryos, and rewriting is what’s possible faster than regulators can catch up.

🧠 Iron accumulation drives neurodegeneration via chronic stress pathway (GEN): Salk Institute researchers have identified chronoferroptosis, a persistent ferroptotic adaptation in neuronal cells, caused by sustained iron dysregulation. They found that the duration of iron stress, rather than the amount, seals a cell’s fate. Cells only lose resilience after prolonged exposure, priming for age-related failure. The lab has already cooked up compounds to inhibit the pathway.

Our take: Iron chelation has spent years bouncing between promise and disappointment. Deferiprone showed neuroprotective benefit in early Parkinson’s trials, then rather awkwardly worsened motor symptoms in later ones, leaving the field bewildered about when to intervene. Chronoferroptosis offers a neater explanation for that inconsistency. Chelating iron in patients who have already spent decades accumulating it may be arriving at the party a little too late.

🐝 Beeline adds $126M to Bain-backed immunology pipeline from Bristol Myers (Endpoints): The Series A extension brings total funding to $426M, the third-largest life sciences round this year behind only Isomorphic Labs and NewLimit. The Bain Capital-backed spinout is developing five immunology assets in-licensed from Bristol Myers Squibb last July, with BMS retaining a 20% stake. Lead asset afimetoran, a once-daily oral TLR7/8 inhibitor for lupus, expects Phase 2 data later this summer.

Our take: Bain Capital has run this precise playbook three times before, spinning SpringWorks out of Pfizer for a $3.9B exit, Cerevel out of Pfizer for $8.7B, and Chinese biotech assets into Aiolos and Timberlyne. And guess what? The same CEO from SpringWorks is now piloting Beeline! This is private equity platform-building dressed in a lab coat, and the returns have been outrageously good.

🖋️ Ipsen pens $1.7B deal to acquire Kartos for potential Jakafi add-on therapy for myelofibrosis (FiercePharma): The French pharma is stumping up $450M upfront, potentially climbing to $1.7B, for Kartos and its Phase 3 asset navtemadlin, an oral MDM2 inhibitor being tested as a Jakafi add-on for myelofibrosis patients who respond poorly to the standard drug. Rezatapopt, PMV Pharmaceuticals’ p53 reactivator, is thrown in for good measure after a jolly promising 43% response rate in mid-phase ovarian cancer trials.

Our take: Ipsen has been busily patching up its oncology bench after the withdrawal of Tazverik, its EZH2 inhibitor, on rather awkward safety grounds. They have since been hoovering up assets like there’s no tomorrow, striking ADC deals with Foreseen Biotech and Simcere Zaiming, and picking up ImCheck Therapeutics for its immuno-oncology work. Kartos is the latest, and shows how a single ugly withdrawal drives years of dealmaking.

And finally…

🇸🇦 Riyadh Global Medical Biotechnology Summit announces scientific program for 2026 edition (BioSpace): The fourth edition of RGMBS, running 14-16 September in Riyadh, will span AI in biotech, multi-omics, biotech investment, immunology, bioengineering, and workforce development. The summit lines up with Saudi Arabia’s National Biotechnology Strategy, which rather ambitiously targets a $34.6B contribution to non-oil GDP by 2040. Previous editions have produced 59 partnership agreements with the likes of Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Novo Nordisk.

Our take: Saudi Arabia is copying Singapore’s homework with more haste than the original, by building the first Middle Eastern jurisdiction where a global pharma company could plausibly develop, manufacture, register, and sell a drug end-to-end without leaving the country. Singapore spent 25 years assembling that stack from scratch, and Riyadh is trying to compress it into 15, without the workforce to draw on.

Tune in 🎧

🍅 Frankenfood | The Mistake Series: Malcolm dispatches Ben to investigate two pivotal errors in food technology – one from the 1990s GM tomato era, one still unfolding – and what they reveal about public trust in engineered food.

👶 The dawn of the designer baby: Jenny Kleeman investigates entrepreneur Cathy Tie’s controversial bid to commercialise embryo gene editing, and what it means for the future of human reproduction.

🌡️ Europe swelters in ‘heat dome’, and Martin Rees on aliens: The science behind Europe’s record-breaking June temperatures, declining HPV vaccine uptake, malaria’s 500,000-year grip on humanity, and Lord Martin Rees on the search for extraterrestrial life.

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🛠 Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Latent Labs: Fancy deploying frontier biology models into pharma pipelines? You’ll own end-to-end customer integrations, build production-grade APIs, and translate real-world deployment learnings.

🧪 Biochemical Scientist, LanthaGen Bio: Fancy engineering proteins to fish rare metals out of electronic waste? You’ll run biochemical and biophysical assays, optimise protein expression and purification, and feed experimental data directly into a computational pipeline.

✏️ Scientific Editor, Device, Cell Press: Got a sharp eye for applied science that matters? You’ll evaluate submissions, shape editorial direction, coordinate special issues, and champion technology and engineering research across the Cell Press portfolio.

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👩‍🔬 08.07 | Women in Biotech - Canary Wharf | London, UK: Hosted by the BIA, this evening of panel discussion and networking gathers CFOs from across the biotech ecosystem to share candid perspectives on building investor relationships, raising capital and championing women in leadership. Open to all.

🥼09.07 | Disrupting Bio Innovation | Cambridge, UK: Explore the breakthrough technologies, policies, and business models reshaping drug discovery and development, with a focus on translating cutting-edge research into diagnostics and treatments.

🩸16.07 | MedTech Careers AHEAD 2026 Edition | London, UK: Are you looking to launch or grow your career in healthcare engineering and medical technology? Join us for an evening of networking.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX, a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Welcome to those still standing,

This week, Keir Starmer isn't the only one having a bad time: one of Oxford's brightest biotech hopes has been dragged into liquidation, a French startup is waving the white flag on severed nerves with a clever goo, RQ Bio has surrendered to the seasonal flu grind with a long-acting antibody, a new eye drug could make dreaded eyeball injections a far rarer event, and old mice are staging a small rebellion with youthful gut bacteria.

Surrender accepted,

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

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📈 Record-breaking UK biotech firm in near £3 million collapse (Oxford Mail): How the mighty have fallen. OxStem Limited, a once high-flying Oxford biotech, backed by a then-record £16.9m spinout investment, has collapsed in a complex liquidation battle. The company, which aimed to tackle ageing-related diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, was still seeking funding for clinical trials as recently as 2019, before financial trouble set in. Liquidators were appointed in 2022, but the winding-up remains unresolved.

Our take: A headline-grabbing cheque does not always buy survival. The University of Oxford – which spun OxStem out, supplied its founding science and championed its record investment – now sits as a creditor, chasing more than £3m from its own creation through arbitration. Oxford is on every side of the table at once (founder, backer and claimant), a tangle that is precisely why the liquidation has dragged on for three years with no end in sight.

🤕 A startup is using special polymers to better help nerves heal (Wired): French startup Tissium has developed a biodegradable goo that might help severed nerves knit back together after surgery. Made from fatty acids and glycerol, the material acts as a temporary splint, holding damaged nerves steady while the body sets about its own repairs. In a US trial of 12 patients with finger nerve injuries, all who completed follow-up regained the ability to feel temperature, pain, texture and light touch, vs a meaningful recovery rate of just 54% for the sutures it would replace.

Our take: A clean run across the patients who completed the trial is a charming result on a thin evidence base. The commercial test will be whether better sensation and fewer complications are achieved in larger, more diverse patient groups. A 200-patient US hernia trial and an upcoming cardiovascular pivotal trial will be the real proving ground for the polymer platform; surgeons and hospitals, quite understandably, will want consistency at scale before reaching for the goo.

🤧 RQ Bio raises $115m for long-acting flu antibody (European Biotechnology Magazine): The London-based company has raised a hefty Series A to push RQB01, a long-acting flu-prevention antibody, towards the clinic. Backed by life sciences investors and LifeArc Ventures, the firm’s vision is to develop a single jab to shield vulnerable patients for a whole season. RQB01 targets conserved parts of the virus that do not change year to year, the idea being that one shot covers broad strains where vaccines alone fall short.

Our take: RQ Bio is chasing a narrow target: vulnerable patients whose immune systems cannot mount an adequate response to a vaccine. The trouble is, everyone else is chasing it too. Better mRNA vaccines, rival antibodies and nasal sprays like Leyden Labs’ are all converging on the same small group. RQB01’s pitch is one jab for a whole season, but it has to prove that the gap is wide enough to justify this much capital.

👀 Ollin refuels with $330M to back pivotal tests of Vabysmo challenger (BioPharmaDive): Ollin Biosciences is pushing ahead with its lead eye disease drug OLN324 into pivotal trials, in one of biotech’s biggest venture rounds of the year. The antibody is being lined up as a challenger to Roche’s Vabysmo, which racked up around $5B in 2025 after less than four full years on the market. Early data hints that OLN324 may prove more potent and longer-lasting than the incumbent.

Our take: Beating Vabysmo on raw efficacy is not the prize Ollin is chasing. The real game is to change the treatment calculus for diseases in which patients currently endure repeated jabs into the eyeball over many years. If OLN324 can meaningfully extend durability, the real value will lie in reducing clinic capacity pressure, patient burden and long-term treatment fatigue.

And finally…

💩 Faecal transplant makes the brains of old mice act young again (The New Scientist): Transplanting gut microbiomes from younger animals has been shown to boost brain plasticity, enhancing the brain’s ability to remodel itself and form new connections. Treated mice exhibited responses similar to young animals, suggesting their brains had regained some adaptability. Additionally, the study revealed that disrupting the microbiome in young mice with antibiotics affected more than 1,000 genes in the visual cortex.

Our take: Brain plasticity has always been considered fixed after childhood. If the gut microbiome really does govern this adaptability, early-life antibiotics and diet may matter more than appreciated. Faecal transplants may be a crude starting point, but the implications run deep: disorders currently written off as untreatable after childhood – like amblyopia, or lazy eye – might not be so permanent after all.

Tune in 🎧

🧑‍🔬 BIO International Convention 2026: Former Evotec CEO Werner Lanthaler explains why BIO is the industry’s most important partnering forum, and shares practical, hard-won advice for biotechs.

🧪 Keeping an early-stage cell therapy biotech in the black with IN8bio’s William Ho: A candid, step-by-step account of financing a gamma delta T-cell company through a tough IPO market and prolonged cash constraints.

🔥 A pipeline in a product that reimagines control of inflammation: BioAegis CEO Susan Levinson discusses recombinant human plasma gelsolin as a potential first-in-class therapy for ARDS and other inflammasome-driven diseases.

Apply ✍️

🧬 Business Development Manager, Biocytogen: Ready to bridge science and dealmaking in biopharma? You’ll combine deep scientific expertise with commercial acumen to source opportunities, lead negotiations, and represent the company at global conferences.

🔬 Senior Scientist, Evotec: Interested in leading complex biologics programmes from design to delivery? You’ll drive antibody and protein engineering projects end-to-end, overseeing experimental strategy, high-throughput workflows, and data quality.

🦀 Clinical Study Lead, In Vitro Diagnostics, QIAGEN: Passionate about driving global studies for precision oncology diagnostics? You’ll lead full clinical performance programmes, designing protocols, managing cross-functional teams and sites, and delivering regulatory submissions.

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🕶️ 02.07 | BIA Summer Party | London, UK: Join the sector’s finest for an unforgettable evening of cocktails, canapés, and high-level networking. Whether you’re looking to connect with peers or showcase your brand, the Summer Party offers the perfect setting.

💡 04-08.07 | 50th FEBS Congress | Maastricht, Netherlands: A landmark gathering in molecular and cellular life sciences featuring Nobel laureates and global research leaders, with plenary lectures and 17 symposia showcasing the latest discoveries across the field.

🥼 09.07 | Disrupting Bio Innovation | Cambridge, UK: Explore the breakthrough technologies, policies and business models reshaping drug discovery, with a focus on translating cutting-edge research into diagnostics and treatments.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my regenerating readers,

The streamers have barely come down from last week’s 100th issue milestone, and we’re at it again – this old Bird turns two this week!

In celebration, this week’s stories: machine learning breathes new life into natural product discovery, Berlin’s drug pricing reform hits a midlife crisis, mRNA flu vaccines outlast the standard shot, oral Wegovy is the new kid on the block in UK pharmacies, and Texas A&M coaxes mammalian regeneration out of dormancy – encouraging news for a bird with a complicated relationship to extinction.

Many happy returns,

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

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🌿 Machine learning identifies natural compound to treat lung disease (News Medical): Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a devastating disease with a median survival of 3–5 years. Using machine learning, researchers screened 16,700+ herbal compounds and landed on dihydromyricetin (DHM), a flavonoid from the Japanese raisin tree, which blocks ALK5 – the receptor that drives TGF-β signalling and with it lung fibrosis. In a mouse study, DHM shrank fibrotic lesions while showing a better safety profile than existing drugs.

Our take: Current pharmacotherapies, including pirfenidone and nintedanib, only slow IPF’s decline and do not halt or reverse fibrosis. That is what makes DHM interesting. Blocking ALK5 directly is a sharper shot at the fibrotic process itself, and in a disease this short on options, a cleaner mechanism is urgently needed. The catch is that TGF-β also works as a tumour suppressor; researchers have reported that blocking it has been linked to skin cancers in trials, so the trick will be silencing it in the lung without activating it everywhere else.

🇩🇪 German government to abandon variable drug discounting plans (Reuters): Berlin has dropped the variable rebate mechanism from its healthcare reform bill following intense industry pushback, replacing it with a fixed-rate discount so companies can plan ahead. The climbdown came after drugmakers threatened to pull money out, with Lilly halving a planned €2.3B German investment and AstraZeneca and Pfizer issuing similar threats. It is only a single concession though; the wider reform package keeps its price freeze extension and binding price-volume discounts.

Our take: Germany is trying to close a €20B funding gap, and the drug industry has just shown how much leverage it holds over that effort, with a single threat to pull investment enough to make the government u-turn on one of its cost-cutting measures within weeks. This has implications across Europe, where health systems face the same funding pressures. Both sides have now learnt the same lesson: pressure works, making any similar reform harder for the next government.

💉 mRNA Flu vaccine shows stronger, longer-lasting immune response (GEN): New research published in Nature Immunology shows Moderna's mRNA-1010 produced broader and longer-lasting antibody responses than a standard flu shot, and recognised strains the shot was not built to target. Five of 13 recipients developed germinal centre responses in the lymph nodes lasting the full 26 weeks, against none of the 15 people on the standard flu shot.

Our take: This is the first solid evidence the mRNA platform does something biologically different to standard flu shots, not just a stronger version of the same response. It lands at a pointed moment: mRNA-1010 was hit with a rare refusal-to-file in February, then won a unanimous 9-0 vote from the FDA’s advisory committee this week, with the final decision due 5 August. Reject it now and the FDA overrules its own experts, a hard position to defend.

💊 Weight-loss drug Wegovy to be available in pill form in UK for first time (BBC News): The MHRA has cleared Novo Nordisk’s oral semaglutide for prescription in the UK, the first oral GLP-1 approved for weight management. Taken once daily on an empty stomach, the tablet offers an alternative for patients who cannot or will not inject; at 25mg, it carries more than ten times the semaglutide of the injected version. NHS access depends on a NICE assessment Novo Nordisk has yet to initiate.

Our take: The appeal is obvious – a daily pill reaches people who would never inject. The catch is the dose: Wegovy compensates for how little semaglutide survives digestion by loading in far more of it, keeping manufacturing costs stubbornly high. Lilly’s orforglipron, by comparison, is a non-peptide small molecule, which is far cheaper to make at scale. Once orforglipron reaches the UK, Wegovy pills’ position becomes far more precarious, and Novo Nordisk knows it.

And finally…

🦎 Humans may have hidden regenerative powers (ScienceDaily): Texas A&M researchers have regrown amputated body parts in mice, restoring bone, joint, tendon and ligament after digit amputation, though imperfectly. The trick was two growth factors applied in sequence, FGF2 followed five days later by BMP2, which coaxed the wound’s own cells away from forming scar tissue and toward a salamander-like regrowth structure instead. BMP2 already holds FDA approval for spinal fusion and FGF2 is in multiple clinical trials.

Our take: The “hidden regenerative powers” headline writes itself, but the research team is more measured. The near-term prize is scar reduction, not limb regrowth. Fibrosis wrecks healing in burns, surgical wounds and amputations, and even a modest shift away from scarring would matter enormously to patients with no good option. Because both growth factors are already in or near the clinic, that prize could arrive far sooner than any regrown limb. Regeneration, alas, comes too late for this particular bird.

Tune in 🎧

🧠 The Woman Who Felt No Fear: Neuropsychologist Justin Feinstein recounts experiments with a patient whose non-functioning amygdala left her virtually fearless, and the single stimulus that finally triggered panic.

🕊️ Nikola Tesla Fell in Love with a Pigeon: Michael and Hannah explore the physics of Tesla coils and his vision for wireless electricity, alongside the stranger corners of his life – pearl phobias, hypnosis, and an unlikely devotion to one particular bird.

🤖 Cybernetics: Misha Glenny and guests trace how Norbert Wiener’s 1948 framework for studying communication, feedback and control across animals and machines laid the intellectual groundwork for the information age.

Apply ✍️

🎬 Director, CMC Regulatory Affairs, GSK: Got the instincts to steer small molecules through global regulatory scrutiny? You’ll lead CMC strategy across investigational and commercial programmes, identify risks, and keep patient supply firmly on course.

💪 Clinical Development Medical Director, Novartis: Fancy guiding neuromuscular therapies from trial to approval? You'll lead clinical strategy, drive regulatory submissions, and engage KOLs and advisory boards across Novartis's global neuroscience pipeline.

🔬 Senior Development Scientist, Portal Biotech: Keen to productise cutting-edge proteomics? You’ll lead experimental programmes, translate feasibility findings into platform-ready workflows, and manage a team at Portal’s White City headquarters.

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🧬 22-25.06 | BIO International Convention | San Diego, USA: The world’s largest biotech gathering convenes 20,000+ global leaders across pharma, biotech, academia, government and investment, with a strong focus on business development through its BIO Partnering platform, enabling targeted one-to-one meetings.

🩻 23.06 | 9th Annual Workshop on Advances in X-ray Imaging | Manchester, UK: Join scientists from across fields to discuss developments and applications of various X-ray imaging and complementary techniques, and to build international collaborations.

👩‍🔬 08.07 | Women in Biotech - Canary Wharf | London, UK: Hosted by the BIA, this evening of panel discussion and networking gathers CFOs from across the biotech ecosystem to share candid perspectives on building investor relationships, raising capital and championing women in leadership. Open to all.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my caffeinated comrades,

Crack open the bourbons and pop the kettle on, we’ve hit 100 issues! The biotech news just keeps on brewing, and your favourite Dodo has all the tea…

This week: Cambridge scientists brew up an AI-designed vaccine to stay ahead of COVID’s mutations, a new US alliance pours firepower into the biotech space race with China, GSK opens its cheque book for a multibillion-pound oncology buy, a new radiotherapy slashes cancer sessions for England’s prostate patients, and a morning cup of joe could hold the key to future cell therapies.

Happy latte sipping!

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

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☢️ Vaccine made by AI will shield against mutations (The Times): Cambridge researchers have trialled a new “universal” coronavirus vaccine in humans for the first time. Using AI, they’ve designed an antigen targeting the parts of the virus that stay fixed as it mutates, in the hope the jab protects against current strains and variants yet to emerge. In an early trial of 39 volunteers the vaccine triggered immune responses across the Sarbeco family – Covid, SARS and related bat viruses with pandemic potential.

Our take: The clever bit is which part of the virus the vaccine teaches the immune system to attack. Seasonal jabs aim at the spike protein, the part that mutates fastest, which is why they need reformulating every year. This one aims at the structural core a coronavirus struggles to change without breaking itself, so each new variant should still carry it and still get recognised.

🚀 New biotech group rises to fuel American rockets in China space race (BioSpace): A new lobbying group is in town and wants the US to stop talking about China’s rise and start building its own plan. The American Biotech Innovation Alliance, founded by Patroski Lawson and backed by around 50 companies, including Moderna, is pushing for a national biotech strategy by 2027, aiming to unite industry, academia and investors behind a coordinated roadmap for biomedical innovation.

Our take: It’s worth looking a little closer at who is holding the pen... Lawson runs a lobbying shop paid by biotechs, and the founding roster is the incumbents with the most to lose from Chinese undercutting. A ‘national strategy’ from that quarter could mean domestic tax breaks, quicker approvals and a wall around Chinese trial data, with the framing turning plain self-interest into something Congress can salute.

🤑 GSK makes biggest ever acquisition with $10.6bn for US cancer drug firm (The Guardian): The UK pharma giant is rebuilding its oncology ambitions and buying Nuvalent, a Boston biotech with two late-stage non-small cell lung cancer drugs – zidesamtinib and neladalkib – under FDA review. If approved, both could launch later this year and become multi-billion-dollar products. The deal also gives GSK access to Nuvalent’s wider lung cancer pipeline, including Ris-Rez, a late-stage candidate that could treat multiple forms of cancer.

Our take: What GSK is buying here is a launch, with the pipeline as a bonus. Both lead drugs face FDA decisions in September and November, so the $10.6B buys products that could be on the market within months. After a run of modest bolt-ons, Miels has gone big on near-term, de-risked assets to plug the revenue gap before the patent cliffs bite, Ris-Rez the longer-term upside thrown in.

💩 Advanced radiotherapy for prostate cancer to cut sessions from 20 to five (BBC News): The NHS is rolling out stereotactic ablative radiotherapy (SABR) to thousands of men with early prostate cancer, with all 48 NHS England radiotherapy centres expected to start offering it within weeks. The technique fires precisely targeted doses from many directions, paring back side effects and hastening recovery. Around 3,500 patients a year are likely to opt in, a sizeable shift towards leaner, less gruelling cancer care.

Our take: SABR could become a pressure release valve for the cancer backlog. Cutting prostate sessions by three quarters frees up staff capacity across stretched cancer services while handing back valuable machine time to every other cancer in the queue. The dividend is narrower than the headline implies though, with only 3,500 of 17,500 eligible men expected to take it up.

And finally…

☕ AI reimagines caffeine as a molecular off‑switch for engineered cells (GEN): Texas A&M researchers have used AI-guided protein design to create CODS, a caffeine-operated molecular switch that acts like a cellular “pause button” with a synthetic mini‑binder designed using the BindCraft platform. In early lab tests, caffeine could switch off gene circuits, trigger engineered cell death and temporarily dampen CAR-T cell activity, pointing to safer, more responsive future cell therapies.

Our take: Patient caffeine intake varies wildly, and a heavy coffee drinker has a very different baseline from someone who avoids the stuff. Therapeutic CAR-T deactivation needs precise pharmacokinetic control, and caffeine clearance swings up to 40-fold between individuals thanks to CYP1A2 variants – so the same cup that trips the switch in one patient could barely register in another. And because caffeine is everywhere, patients (and doctors) would have to police every coffee, tea and cola to avoid setting it off by accident.

Tune in 🎧

🧬 Ardelyx Leaders Mike Raab & Laura Williams on building biotech around patients: How embedding patient advocacy into Ardelyx has shaped its culture and steadied it through setbacks, from the leaders who drove it.

📅 The editors’ roundtable: A midyear look at the 2026 life sciences industry: LSC joins Business of Biotech host Tyler Menichiello to unpack key industry trends shaping 2026, from AI-driven manufacturing regulation and supply chain pressures to IPO signals.

🍼 Milk Proteins without the dairy: Adam Tarshis and Dr. Cory Tobin explain how Mozza is building a better dairy alternative, using microbial fermenters to brew the proteins behind cheese’s stretch, texture and bite.

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🤖 Account Manager, PROCEPT BioRobotics: Ready to grow robotic BPH surgery adoption across target hospitals? You’ll build territory plans, support surgeons and surgical teams, lead account reviews, drive Aquabeam utilisation, and manage forecasts and CRM reporting.

💰 Business Development Manager, Biosynth: Interested in turning pharma and biotech prospects into long-term clients? You’ll drive forward the sales process, build a strong industry network, negotiate contracts, spot market opportunities, and work with marketing and BD teams to grow the Life Sciences division.

🩻 Field Applications Specialist, Beckman Coulter Diagnostic: Want to help labs get more from diagnostic IT and automation systems? You’ll deliver application support, train laboratory teams, support installations and go-lives, troubleshoot customer issues, and work with sales and service colleagues to improve workflows.

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🤑 15.06 | Capital For Cures Liquidity Event – Royalty Financing | Amsterdam, Netherlands: This networking and panel event brings together investors, family offices and biotech innovators to discuss royalty financing, with a focus on how non-dilutive capital can fund breakthroughs while preserving long-term value.

🩺 15–18.06 | HLTH Europe 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands: Europe’s biggest healthcare innovation gathering hauls 5,000+ leaders to Amsterdam, with one in three at the C-suite level, to thrash out the continent’s particular healthcare headaches and opportunities.

🧬 22-25.06 | BIO International Convention | San Diego, USA: The world’s largest biotech gathering convenes 20,000+ global leaders across pharma, biotech, academia, government and investment, with a strong focus on business development and partnering.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hi my fellow lab rats,

This week, Swedish researchers break free of biological constraints with artificial heart muscle made from conductive plastic, SMArT liberates CRISPR from its genomic baggage filtering dangerous edits before they reach patients, Osaka scientists unleash tomato-picking robots, Chinese biotech escapes its discount-era pricing, and the FDA releases cancer drug development from mandatory animal testing.

Free at last,

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

Discover 🔍

🫀 Scientists create conductive plastic to replicate heart muscle cells (Bioengineer.org): Researchers at Linköping University, led by Simone Fabiano, have built an artificial cardiomyocyte from conductive polymers, the first contraption to recreate the slow calcium channel dynamics that drive cardiac contraction. Published in Nature Communications, the device handles both ionic and electronic conductivity, paving the way for biocompatible pacemakers, sensors for cardiac disturbances, and implants for muscular dystrophy or nerve injury.

Our take: Fabiano’s gang previously built artificial organic neurons emulating sodium and potassium channels. The cardiomyocyte adds slow calcium kinetics, a rather thornier piece of biology inorganic electronics have never got the hang of. Linköping is methodically working through the body’s electrically excitable cell types in plastic, a rather more ambitious programme. The commercial path seems to be bioelectronic medicine, in which polymers sidestep silicon’s immune-related issues.

🧬 New SMArT platform improves safety of CRISPR gene editing (News Medical): Edited blood stem cells can now be enriched to near-purity, thanks to SMArT, a CRISPR add-on built by Luigi Naldini’s San Raffaele Telethon group. The platform uses transient synthetic AND-gate reporters to hoover out cells carrying potentially harmful genomic alterations. The most advanced version uses a single CRISPR regulatory system to detect correct integration and switch on genes that may improve stem cell engraftment.

Our take: Two earlier sickle cell trials were paused after patients developed myeloid malignancies, traced to cytotoxic conditioning or insertional mutagenesis from lentiviral vectors. CRISPR was meant to be the cleaner alternative by editing in situ, though the risk simply migrated, with large deletions and chromosomal rearrangements from Cas9 cuts emerging as the new bogeyman. SMArT concedes the field couldn’t engineer those out and built a sorting system to find the survivors.

🍅 Scientists develop virtual tomato training arena for agricultural robots (Phys.org): 3D Gaussian splatting and Unreal Engine 5, more commonly the domain of video games, have been put to work generating synthetic training data for tomato-picking robots. The virtual farm, built by Takuya Fujinaga’s team at Osaka Metropolitan University, automatically produces images and YOLO-formatted labels for AI vision systems, sidestepping the slog of hand annotation, with plans already underway to extend the approach to other crops.

Our take: The bottleneck in agricultural AI isn’t the hardware these days – robots can already pick tomatoes at 86.7% accuracy, and the kit has been steadily improving for years. The constraint is the vision system telling them which one to pick, and those systems run on labelled training data that farms have been paying humans to produce, season after season. A virtual farm doing that labour for free should generalise across crops.

🇨🇳 No longer a bargain pool, Chinese biotechs command higher premiums (BioSpace): Total deal value for China-developed assets has risen to $10.1B so far this year, a sharp escalation from previous discount-driven dynamics. Eli Lilly leads as the most aggressive buyer with over $13B committed since March 2025. Platform deals are replacing single-asset licensing as the dominant transaction model, and Chinese biotechs are increasingly demanding upfront payments closer to those of comparable US counterparts.

Our take: The bargain bin has closed. Royalty rates on Chinese deals have settled at the 10-13% range now standard for these deals, with single-digit royalties largely vanished. Astellas-Hutchmed was the last big single-digit deal, and rates that had previously sunk to 2-3% are gone for good. The economics have reset entirely, leaving Western buyers paying more upfront and more in perpetuity, changing the calculation for anyone still treating China as a value play.

And finally…

🐭 FDA ends mandatory animal testing for cancer therapeutics effective June 2026 (GeneOnline News): Draft guidance issued on 29 May proposes to reduce animal testing in nonclinical safety studies for oncology biologics and conjugated products, with public comments open until 30 July. The guidance builds on FDAMA 2.0, which removed the blanket animal-testing mandate in 2022, and supplements existing ICH and FDA frameworks. It signals the agency’s broader push to embrace new approach methodologies, including organs-on-chips and in silico modelling.

Our take: Animal models have less than 8% correlation with human clinical trial outcomes in oncology, which makes preclinical mouse testing in cancer not so much ethically uncomfortable as scientifically rather suspect. The FDA isn’t being kind – it’s catching up. Mouse xenografts have failed to predict human cancer responses for decades, and the draft guidance simply acknowledges what every oncology developer has known for years. From one Dodo to a great many laboratory pals, this bird says good riddance.

Tune in 🎧

🦠 Why the Ebola Outbreak Has Been Nearly Impossible to Stop: NYT Africa correspondent Declan Walsh reports from the epicentre of one of the worst Ebola outbreaks in history, examining why under-resourced health workers are struggling to contain its spread.

⌛ The past, present and future of DNA science: Professor Turi King traces DNA science from forensic fingerprinting to medical screening, and what her book reveals about the secrets genetics has yet to unlock.

🧠 Outside of Our Minds: Anthropologists, historians, and a brain-computer interface researcher trace how humans have externalised thought from stone carvings to AI, and where the next frontier of communication may lead.

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🥼 Senior lab Technician, Portal Biotech: Think you could keep a single-molecule protein sequencing platform stocked, safe, and shipshape? You'll own reagent prep, inventory, equipment servicing, and lab operations that are scaling quickly toward a global product launch.

🎬 Associate Director Safety Sciences, BioNTech: Got a forensic eye for emerging safety signals in oncology? You'll oversee safety surveillance, author DSURs and Risk Management Plans, contribute to regulatory submissions, and act as Subject Matter Expert.

⚙️ GMP Production Biotechnologist, OXB: Ready to get hands-on with viral vector manufacture at one of gene therapy's original pioneers? You'll lead GMP processes, act as SME for SOPs and batch documentation, and train others across lentivirus, AAV, and adenoviral programmes.

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🖥️ 08–12.06 | London Tech Week | London, UK: Europe’s premier tech gathering – drawing innovators, investors and enterprise leaders to hear from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Isomorphic Labs and the UK government on what’s next in tech.

🔬 10–12.06 | BioInference 2026 | St Andrews, UK: A three-day academic conference at Scotland’s oldest university, bringing together statisticians and biologists to tackle inference problems across epidemiology, genomics, spatial omics, and mathematical biology.

🤑 15.06 | Capital For Cures Liquidity Event – Royalty Financing | Amsterdam, Netherlands: This networking and panel event brings together investors, family offices and biotech innovators to discuss royalty financing, with a focus on how non-dilutive capital can fund breakthroughs while preserving long-term value.

🩺 15–18.06 | HLTH Europe 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands: Europe’s biggest healthcare innovation gathering hauls 5,000+ leaders to Amsterdam, with one in three at C-suite level, to thrash out the continent’s particular healthcare headaches and opportunities.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow pipette pioneers,

This week: a skin-worn ultrasound keeps watch over babies in the womb, Oxford scientists scramble to ready an Ebola jab as an outbreak rages, Eli Lilly goes on a vaccine shopping spree, US lawmakers eye Chinese biotech deals with fresh suspicion, a new solid tumour treatment treats its first patient, and a start-up reckons it can grow sperm in a lab.

Mind the petri dish!

Dodo

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👶 Scientists create wearable ultrasound to continuously monitor babies in womb (The Guardian): A new skin-worn device could give doctors a continuous, real-time view of foetal health, rather than relying on occasional snapshots during clinic visits. Where current methods rely on intermittent scans or imprecise continuous monitoring, the “UPatch” tracks foetal heart rate and blood flow as the baby moves about. Early trials in the US and UK show it matches traditional ultrasound accuracy.

Our take: Continuous monitoring could unlock far deeper understanding of why some babies survive in the womb and others don’t – and the researchers are clear that preventing stillbirth is the ambition. In one case, the patch flagged severe growth restriction in a pre-eclamptic patient, prompting a life-saving early C-section. The potential is particularly significant in low-resource settings, where repeated clinic scans and skilled operators are hard to come by.

💉 UK scientists developing Ebola vaccine that could be ready for trials in months (BBC News): Oxford scientists are racing to adapt their Covid-era vaccine platform for a rare but deadly Ebola strain now driving an emergency outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The experimental Bundibugyo jab could reach clinical trials within two to three months, though plenty of uncertainty remains. Should it work, it would be deployed through ring vaccination, targeting close contacts and frontline health workers.

Our take: The harder problem here is logistics, not immunology. A Bundibugyo response leans on spotting cases quickly through community surveillance, tracing complex contact networks to break transmission, and getting jabs to remote settings where cold-chain kit and reliable transport are frequently nowhere to be found. A clever vaccine counts for little if the machinery meant to deliver it buckles under the pressure of an escalating epidemic.

💰 Eli Lilly to buy three small vaccine developers (STAT): Eli Lilly has snapped up three early- and mid-stage vaccine developers in deals worth up to nearly $4B, each pairing an upfront payment with milestones tied to clinical and regulatory progress. Curevo brings a shingles jab designed to improve on the tolerability of GSK’s Shingrix, LimmaTech a Staphylococcus aureus vaccine with surgical infection prevention in mind, and Vaccine Company an Epstein-Barr virus candidate linked to long-term risk reduction for multiple sclerosis and several cancers.

Our take: The targets are vaccines against pathogens known to trigger chronic complications downstream – shingles with stroke risk, EBV with multiple sclerosis and cancer. That framing nudges Lilly beyond straightforward prevention into disease modification territory, and helps make the commercial case at a time of broader pressure on vaccine manufacturers. The buys fold neatly into a GLP-1-funded acquisition spree that has now reached oncology, autoimmune disease, sleep disorders, and infectious disease in the space of a year.

🧬 Ori Biotech and ImmuXell announce strategic partnership and dose first patient (BioSpace): The first patient has been dosed in an investigator-initiated trial targeting KRAS G12V-mutated solid tumours, including colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, and lung cancer. Shanghai-based ImmuXell partnered with Ori Biotech, using their IRO® platform to manufacture the TCR-T cell therapy in just four months.

Our take: For cancers with no good treatment options, speed to patients is everything – and cell therapy manufacturing has historically been slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. IRO® is designed to eliminate those tradeoffs: speed without sacrificing quality, scale without sacrificing cost. If it delivers on that promise more broadly, the implications for patient access go well beyond this trial.

🇨🇳 As calls for COINS Act expansion grow, will new rules sweep up China biotech licensing? (Fierce Biotech): As American biopharma increasingly looks to China for faster, cheaper innovation, some US policymakers want biotechnology folded into the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, which restricts outbound investment in sensitive sectors. Supporters argue intervention is needed to protect domestic innovation and competitiveness.

Our take: This change could bring fresh scrutiny to licensing deals, NewCo structures, and joint ventures with Chinese assets – potentially slowing dealmaking and pushing up costs. Chinese biotech assets have become attractive partly because they can offer strong clinical data, faster development timelines and lower costs than Western assets. But if every deal starts carrying extra legal review, government notification and political risk, the economics begin to change.

And finally…

🍆 Will lab-grown sperm let infertile men have children of their own? (The New Scientist): A US start-up is claiming it can grow sperm in the lab for men who produce none of their own. Paterna Biosciences says it can take stem cells from the testes and coax them into sperm cells, potentially opening a fresh route to biological fatherhood. The unmet need is real enough, particularly for men who produce no sperm and have precious few options as things stand.

Our take: This is not a blanket fix for male infertility. Even if Paterna can do what it claims, patients would still need viable stem cells in the testes to harvest in the first place. For men whose infertility stems from genetic defects, lab-grown sperm may therefore need pairing with gene editing – which raises the prospect of gene-edited children, one of bioethics’ most contested territories.

Tune in 🎧

🤑 $250M VC explains women’s health market: endometriosis & PCOS: This episode explores why conditions like endometriosis and PCOS remain underdiagnosed and underfunded, despite the growing investor interest in femtech.

🧑‍🔬 From pipettes to python: How to break into computational biology: Dean Lee shares how he built credibility from a bench science background; learned scRNA-seq analysis on the side; and turned self-directed projects, reproducibility work, and public data into a real path into comp bio.

💊 Rare disease drug commercialisation with Zevra Therapeutics’ Neil McFarlane: Zevra’s CEO explores building a focused rare disease company through acquisitions, scaling commercialisation, partnering with patient advocacy groups, and using AI to identify undiagnosed patients.

Apply ✍️

🤝 External Partner Manager, Bristol Myers Squibb: Want to sit at the intersection of science, strategy, and supplier management? You’ll lead relationships with CDMOs, drive joint governance and performance via VDOTs, and translate technical development needs into commercial agreements.

🧫 Biotechnologist, Lonza: Ready to build hands-on GMP manufacturing experience from the ground up? You’ll support production at Lonza’s Slough facility, learn key quality systems like deviations and change control, and help keep manufacturing safe, compliant, and on schedule.

🧪 Field Application Specialist - Downstream Bioprocessing, Merck: Fancy turning DSP expertise into commercial impact? You'll support customers across the UK and Ireland from pre-sales to implementation, partnering with commercial and MSAT teams to spot growth opportunities and shape strategy.

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🖥️ 08–12.06 | London Tech Week | London, UK: Europe’s premier tech gathering – drawing innovators, investors and enterprise leaders to hear from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Isomorphic Labs and the UK government on what’s next in tech.

🔬 10–12.06 | BioInference 2026 | St Andrews, UK: A three-day academic conference at Scotland’s oldest university, bringing together statisticians and biologists to tackle inference problems across epidemiology, genomics, spatial omics, and mathematical biology.

🤑 15.06 | Capital For Cures Liquidity Event – Royalty Financing | Amsterdam, Netherlands: This networking and panel event brings together investors, family offices and biotech innovators to discuss royalty financing, with a focus on how non-dilutive capital can fund breakthroughs while preserving long-term value.

🩺 15–18.06 | HLTH Europe 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands: Europe’s biggest healthcare innovation gathering hauls 5,000+ leaders to Amsterdam, with one in three at C-suite level, to thrash out the continent’s particular healthcare headaches and opportunities.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow hypothesis generators,

This week, Cyclana Bio recruits its first endometriosis patients, Parabilis heads for the public markets with spiral-shaped peptides, DeepMind and Edison are each building an AI scientist, Daiichi lines up five pivotal ADC readouts, and Cowboy Space Corporation raises $275M to launch data centres into orbit.

Test your assumptions,

Dodo

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Taking cell therapy inside the body

The next technological leap for genomic medicine uses the machinery inside our cells. What could that mean for patients?

Watch epsisode

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🩸 Cyclana Bio granted Health Research Authority approval and recruits first patients for clinical observational study in endometriosis (NewsMedical): The Cambridge biotech has secured HRA and ethics approval for a 500-patient observational study, running across two NHS sites, using patient biopsies and donated menstrual fluid to build 3D in vitro models of endometriosis. Comparing tissue-level dynamics in healthy women against those with the condition, it aims to uncover the disease’s underlying biology, identify druggable targets, and develop patient stratification tools.

Our take: Endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women, takes an average of eight years to diagnose, and has no cure – a research gap that reflects how routinely women's pain has been dismissed and deprioritised. The progressive disease can affect every stage of a woman's life, and yet the biological foundations needed to direct drug development have simply never been properly established. Cyclana’s tissue-first methodology is a rare attempt to fill that gap.

🧬 After raising $800M, Parabilis seeks an IPO to pursue ‘undruggable’ targets (BioPharma Dive): Founded as FogPharma in 2015, the Boston biotech enters the public markets with early clinical data in hand and a potential $2B Regeneron deal behind it. Its Helicons – spiral-shaped peptides designed to reach cancer-driving proteins beyond the grasp of conventional drugs – have shown early promise in desmoid tumours, with Phase 3 planning underway and ambitions stretching into more common cancers.

Our take: FOG-001 targets the β-catenin/TCF transcription factor interaction – one of the canonical undruggable problems in oncology. Transcription factors have no obvious binding pocket for small molecules, which is why the field has largely given up on them. Helicons mimic the alpha-helical structures proteins use to interact with each other, effectively picking the lock from the inside. If that holds beyond desmoid tumours, the addressable market is considerably larger than the IPO filing suggests.

🤖 Google DeepMind and Edison are building the AI Scientist (GEN): Two independently developed systems that automate the scientific method have landed in Nature – both built to generate, test, and refine hypotheses using AI. DeepMind’s Gemini-powered Co-Scientist generated hypotheses across drug repurposing, target discovery, and antimicrobial resistance, while Edison’s Robin went a step further – proposing a glaucoma drug for dry age-related macular degeneration and validating it in patient-derived cells. Edison is now deploying its newer system, Kosmos, with Incyte.

Our take: The promise is an AI capable of closing the loop between hypothesis and validation. Robin’s most interesting result is the identification of KL001 – a circadian clock modulator – as a candidate for macular degeneration: a connection entirely absent from existing literature. This suggests that the real value of AI may not be speed, but the ability to surface biological links that human researchers would never think to look for.

💸 Daiichi emerges from bruising 2 years with vision for cracking cancer’s big leagues (BioSpace): After a bruising run – a collapsed HER3 candidate, a narrowed Datroway approval, and $850M in manufacturing charges – Daiichi is betting five pivotal ADC readouts in its 2027 financial year will catapult it into the top tier of oncology. The targets range from small cell lung cancer to platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, each forecast at $2-6B in peak sales.

Our take: The ambition is understandable – Enhertu proved Daiichi can build a genuinely transformative ADC, and the pipeline has real candidates in small cell lung cancer and platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. The five pivotal readouts due in 2027 carry a $2-6B peak sales forecast apiece – optimistic figures from a company that has had to learn, rather painfully, the distance between projection and outcome.

And finally…

🛰️ How Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt plans to put data centers in space (Forbes): Cowboy Space Corporation, founded by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt, has raised $275M at a $2B valuation to build orbital data centres – 20,000 of them, per an FCC filing. The pitch rests on constant solar power and housing 1MW of chips inside the rocket’s upper stage, rather than a separate satellite, with a first launch targeted for end-2028.

Our take: Google, SpaceX, Starcloud, Axiom, Lumen Orbit, and now Cowboy – orbital data centres went from concept to stampede in under two years, all fleeing the same terrestrial backlash over power and water that the AI boom keeps feeding. The central unsolved problem is heat: 1MW of chips generates enormous amounts of it, and in space there is no air to dissipate it. Cowboy’s answer: using the rocket fairing as a giant radiator. (Inter)stellar stuff!

Tune in 🎧

🧬 Can we reverse ageing? NYT Magazine’s Susan Dominus unpacks recent breakthroughs in cellular rejuvenation science, including who is funding the research, and what it might mean for the $2 trillion longevity market.

🍄 Can Hue Believe It? Gerit Tolborg’s Quest for Pure Colour at Chromologics: The Chromologics CEO explains how fermentation-derived fungal pigments could replace synthetic food dyes – covering economics, regulatory hurdles, and the case for decentralising supply chains.

🤖 Trump’s Tech Posse in China; Who’s Winning in Musk v. Altman?; Hantavirus Conspiracy Theories: WIRED’s Uncanny Valley team covers Trump’s Silicon Valley-heavy China trip, the OpenAI nonprofit lawsuit, and the conspiracy theories swirling around hantavirus.

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🎯 Commercial Coordinator for Pharma & Biotech, Pharmaron: Fancy being the commercial glue between a CDMO site and its clients? You'll manage RFPs, track revenue milestones, handle invoicing, and keep customer relationships running smoothly from Cramlington.

🧪 GMP Production Scientist, eXmoor: Ready to get hands-on with cell and gene therapies in the cleanroom? You'll carry out GMP manufacture of clinical-grade ATMPs, support tech transfer and scale-up to 200L, and keep production documentation and environments audit-ready.

📊 Senior Data Manager, Transition Bio: Got a talent for bringing order to messy scientific data? You'll own the Dotmatics platform, manage ADMET and DMPK datasets from CROs, and build the data infrastructure that keeps a multidisciplinary discovery team moving.

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🦾 27–28.05 | Digi-Tech Pharma & AI 2026 | London, UK: Pharma leaders and digital innovators converge on Kensington to chew over AI in drug discovery, real-world evidence, quantum computing, and the regulatory tangles that inevitably trail digital transformation.

🖥️ 08–12.06 | London Tech Week | London, UK: Europe's premier tech gathering – drawing innovators, investors and enterprise leaders to hear from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Isomorphic Labs and the UK government on what's next in tech.

🔬 10–12.06 | BioInference 2026 | St Andrews, UK: A three-day academic conference at Scotland’s oldest university, bringing together statisticians and biologists to tackle inference problems across epidemiology, genomics, spatial omics, and mathematical biology.

🩺 15–18.06 | HLTH Europe 2026 | Amsterdam, Netherlands: Europe’s biggest healthcare innovation gathering hauls 5,000+ leaders to Amsterdam, with one in three at C-suite level, to thrash out the continent’s healthcare headaches and opportunities.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow seafarers,

This week has been anything but calm waters: Isomorphic Labs is going full steam ahead on one of the largest funding rounds in biotech history, Roche dropped a quarter‑billion dollar bounty on an AI pathology deal, a Bristol-based biotech is making waves toward a potential hantavirus vaccine, Kyverna is preparing to drop anchor with one of the first CAR-T therapies for autoimmune disease, and jellyfish are emerging as a surprisingly sustainable source of collagen.

Mind the tentacles!

Dodo

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Treating a new realm of diseases

Beyond traditional limits: explore the drug delivery technology opening new doors in genomic medicine.

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💰 AI-fuelled Isomorphic bags $2.1B, the second largest biotech round ever (BioSpace): Alphabet’s AI-driven biotech has hauled in one of the biggest biotech rounds in history, despite having no disclosed molecules and nothing in the clinic. In a market where investors are fleeing early-stage risk and piling into late-stage assets, Isomorphic is a rather peculiar outlier. Rather than focusing on one target, the company plans to build a broader pipeline, particularly across oncology and immunology.

Our take: Isomorphic is being valued as a multi-programme AI operating system for drug discovery, rather than a pipeline of discrete assets. It has to be said, traditional biotech models – where capital is tied to specific indications and milestones – look rather old-fashioned by comparison. Platform companies spawning dozens of programmes across partners will compress valuation multiples for single-asset peers. The bar for non-platform biotechs just got considerably higher.

🤑 Roche acquires PathAI for $750m upfront to advance AI-powered digital pathology (BioXconomy): Roche is taking its long-standing partnership with PathAI to a rather logical conclusion, hauling the AI pathology specialist in-house in a deal worth $750M, with up to $300M in milestones. The deal tucks PathAI neatly into Roche’s diagnostics division. At the heart of the deal is PathAI’s AI-powered Image Management System, designed to streamline lab workflows and deliver faster, more accurate diagnoses from digital tissue samples.

Our take: With this move, Roche is getting ahead of a scenario where a rival pharma or diagnostics giant secures a scalable computational pathology backbone first. AI-assisted pathology is becoming as routine as sequencing or imaging – whoever controls the underlying software stack gains outsized influence over how cancer trials are designed, how biomarkers are validated, and how “digital” pathology gets defined in everyday clinical practice.

💉 Bristol biotech firm makes strides in developing a vaccine for hantavirus (Bristol 24/7): EnsiliTech is developing an mRNA-LNP vaccine candidate for hantavirus, following the recent outbreak aboard the MV Hondius that claimed three lives. Backed by the Small Business Research Initiative, the University of Bath spinout has produced a candidate showing rather promising results in animal testing. The team is now seeking additional funding to continue preclinical development and move towards IND approval.

Our take: Hantavirus sits in a rather awkward spot commercially: it’s lethal enough to matter, but outbreaks are scattered across regions that don’t exactly scream high-margin markets. That leaves public funding and partnerships doing the heavy lifting, rather than classic pharma pull, with EnsiliTech’s progress contingent on whether enough institutions remain willing to bankroll neglected infectious-disease innovation as the headlines move on.

💊 Kyverna begins rolling submission for autoimmune CAR-T as FDA requests more natural history analysis (Fierce Pharma): Kyverna is inching toward a landmark FDA approval for miv-cel, which could become the first autoimmune CAR-T to reach the market. The company has filed a rolling Biologics License Application after winning FDA backing for the notion that its single-arm KYSA-8 trial can support an application for stiff person syndrome, alongside additional analysis from a 153-patient natural history study.

Our take: After the FDA rejected uniQure’s Huntington’s gene therapy on natural history grounds, the same playbook looked rather shakier for cell and gene therapies. Kyverna securing FDA alignment on that design suggests the agency hasn’t entirely closed the door. If the FDA approves, small, high-need autoimmune indications could become proving grounds for cell therapies that would otherwise struggle to launch in broader, messier patient populations.

And finally…

🪼 How jellyfish bycatch could be valuable collagen source for cosmetics and biotech (Frontiers): Marine scientists Dr Ainara Ballesteros and PhD student Raquel Torres are turning a rather slimy ocean nuisance into biotech feedstock. Jellyfish bycatch from small-scale Spanish fisheries can be transformed into rather impressive collagen – rivalling material from carefully collected specimens. Their work blends fieldwork alongside fishers with lab-bench science, showing that what’s routinely tipped overboard could become a sustainable source of marine collagen for cosmetics, biomedicine, and regenerative medicine.

Our take: Jellyfish bycatch has clear promise on paper as a collagen feedstock, but small-scale fleets lack the onboard kit to turn nuisance into commodity. Fleets will require dedicated handling, chilling, and sorting, which means investing in the entire value chain from deck to lab. Coastal institutions would also need to reconfigure their facilities to treat jellyfish as proper marine-biotech feedstock rather than waste.

Tune in 🎧

🧠 Acadia CEO Catherine Owen Adams on neurodegeneration, AI and building biotech vision: From UK pharmacist to biotech CEO, Catherine Owen Adams shares how storytelling shapes leadership across commercialisation, investor engagement, and enterprise vision.

🦠 Building a new antibody discovery platform with Infinimmune’s Wyatt McDonnell, PhD: Infinimmune’s CEO unpacks how single-cell biology and computation are reshaping antibody discovery – and how that approach landed them a Merck collaboration worth up to $838M.

🤖 AI and the future of healthcare: Dr. Emilia Javorsky explores AI’s realistic potential in cancer research and healthcare, examining the role of high-quality data, patient-level individualisation, and the systemic reforms needed to unlock meaningful impact.

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🥼 Account Manager Pharma, bioMérieux: Interested in bridging science and commercial strategy? You’ll drive sales and marketing across the South of England, combining scientific expertise in advanced therapies with business acumen.

🤝 Meetings Centre of Excellence Manager, GSK: Passionate about high-impact HCP engagement? You’ll lead the UK strategy for healthcare professional meetings and external events, partnering cross-functionally to deliver compliant, customer-centric solutions.

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🔬 19–21.05 | Bio-IT World Conference & Expo | Boston, USA: Twenty-five years in, Bio-IT World remains an event where biopharma, clinical research, and tech genuinely converge – and with this year's focus on informatics, data analytics, and AI-driven tools, the timing could hardly be better.

🧪 22–23.05 | PDA Applied Bioprocess Solutions Forum 2026 | Milan, Italy: This highly interactive, community-shaped forum focuses on the cross-industry bioprocessing challenges that don’t have easy answers – from development and manufacturing, to quality and regulatory compliance.

🧑‍⚕️ 01.06 | HealthTech Integrates 2026 | London, UK: This one‑day conference brings together HealthTech companies (technology, diagnostics, devices), clinicians, regulators and investors to wrestle with the gap between promising technology and real-world clinical practice.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow allergy sufferers,

With pollen counts rising and allergy season well underway, this week’s news arrives just in time: Pfizer has had a nasty reaction to its CD47 bet, Big Pharma gets a whiff of Asia’s ageing wave, Switzerland’s biotech sector is positively blooming, Scarlet Therapeutics raises £3.2M, and McGill researchers zap peanuts with cold plasma – reducing their allergenicity by 69%.

Pass the antihistamines,

Dodo

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❌ Pfizer’s $2.3B bet ends in failure as CD47 blocker scrapped (Fierce Biotech): The 2021 Trillium acquisition handed Pfizer a pair of CD47 inhibitors – ontorpacept and maplirpacept – built on the rather appealing notion of teaching macrophages to gobble up cancer cells. Ontorpacept made it to a Phase 2 study for soft tissue cancers, but was binned last year. Maplirpacept has now followed suit, after Phase 1 and 2 trials in blood cancers; Pfizer state “these decisions are not due to safety concerns, regulatory requests, or any study conduct issues”.

Our take: CD47 has been a graveyard for acquisition capital. Pfizer's exit is the latest in a string of expensive lessons, and between Trillium and Gilead's Forty Seven, the class has absorbed over $7B in acquisition costs without a single approved drug. Whether this is because the underlying biology is simply too difficult – the receptor's expression on red blood cells causes anaemia, and cancer cells reliably upregulate alternative "don't eat me" signals – or simply because the right molecule hasn't been found yet, remains to be seen.

🧓🏻 Singapore gets Big Pharma rush to invest in plants for ageing region (Nikkei Asia): Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Novartis have collectively committed over $2.5B to expand manufacturing in Singapore. Pfizer has opened a new active pharmaceutical ingredients facility, AstraZeneca is building its first Singapore site dedicated to antibody drug conjugates, and Novartis is expanding an existing biopharmaceutical plant – all targeting a region where age-related disease burden is growing faster than anywhere else in the world.

Our take: Asia accounts for 49.2% of global cancer cases and 56.1% of cancer deaths – figures that will only swell as the region ages. Pharma has clocked a demographic wave that has been rolling in for decades and is scrambling to get its factories in front of it. The choice of Singapore is hardly surprising: tax advantages, political stability, robust IP protection and proximity to emerging markets make it a natural base for companies that need Asian supply chain resilience without geopolitical exposure.

📈 Swiss Biotech Report confirms the sector’s strong performance (Startupticker): Switzerland’s biotech sector posted record revenues of CHF 7.5B in 2025, with private company funding up 38% to a record CHF 1.15B. The sector now counts over 400 companies and 21,000 R&D staff (both records) while immunologicals – including therapeutic proteins, cell therapies, and vaccines – hit a record 20% share of Swiss exports. There was just one IPO, BioVersys, though it completed Europe’s largest listing of the year.

Our take: Globally, the number of biotech companies and R&D staff has fallen, but Switzerland’s have grown. Talent is likely the differentiator: foreign nationals account for 78% of Swiss unicorn founders, the majority of them STEM PhD graduates, resulting in a talent pool that is genuinely difficult to assemble elsewhere – and perhaps explains why selective investors keep returning.

🩸 Scarlet raises £3.2 million to advance lab-grown red blood cell therapies (European Biotechnology News): Unlike predecessors Rubius and Erytech, which relied on donor material, Scarlet Therapeutics grows RBCs from immortalised cell lines, sidestepping scalability and reproducibility constraints. A £3.2M seed round led by Eos Advisory will fund in vivo animal studies across hyperammonemia and hyperoxaluria, with preclinical data already showing its lab-grown cells circulate with a half-life comparable to donated blood.

Our take: The half-life data is interesting for reasons beyond survival duration. Because all of Scarlet’s cells are new, they expire in synchrony, meaning the therapeutic window is more predictable than with donated blood. For indications like hyperammonemia and hyperoxaluria, where RBCs are essentially deployed as circulating detox machines, that synchrony could translate into a considerably more predictable quarterly dosing model than donor-derived cells allow.

And finally…

🥜 Cold plasma could finally crack peanut allergies, making the nuts less allergenic (BioTechniques): McGill University researchers have shown that blasting peanut protein with ionised gas for 25 minutes reduces its immunoreactivity by 69%, without impacting the taste. The cold plasma treatment also improved digestibility and boosted foaming properties, which is handy for food manufacturing. The researchers reckon the approach could extend to eggs, hazelnuts, and other common allergens.

Our take: Peanut allergy has increased 3.5-fold over two decades, affects around 2% of Western populations, and has no cure. Every approved approach manages the patient: oral immunotherapy, omalizumab, strict avoidance. By contrast, cold plasma goes after the allergen itself, before it reaches the plate. The mechanism has already shown promise in soy, cow’s milk, and whey proteins.

Tune in 🎧

🛰️ The $100B Leak: Fixed From Space: AIRMO’s Daria Stepanova explains how a satellite constellation equipped with micro-lidars could detect methane and CO2 leaks in real time, tackling a $100B annual problem from orbit.

📊 UCB’s Candid buy, Grand Rounds and leukodystrophies: UCB has just paid $2B for one of the leading T-cell engager companies. BioCentury’s analysts dig into whether the price was justified, what it signals for the TCE space, and whether the IPO window is finally creaking open.

🫀 Can the CIA detect your heartbeat from 60km away?: Veritasium investigates the CIA’s rumoured “Ghost Murmur” technology, examining the science behind remote cardiac monitoring and whether the claims hold up.

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🔎 Quality Oversight and Compliance Director, Pfizer: Got an eye for regulations? You’ll develop quality plans, drive inspection readiness, investigate process deviations, and keep pan-regulatory compliance shipshape across manufacturing, submissions, and clinical functions globally.

🔬 Senior Computational Biologist, Recursion: Fancy industrialising drug discovery from first principles? You’ll synthesise diverse biological datasets, build robust omics pipelines, and turn exploratory analyses into reusable tools that accelerate programmes.

🍺 Biotechnologist, Celtic Renewables: Keen to ferment something rather more planet-friendly than beer? You’ll run multi-stage ABE fermentation campaigns, collect and analyse plant samples, and keep a century-old process humming at commercial scale.

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🦠11–15.05 | PEGS Boston | Boston, USA: A flagship conference for protein and antibody engineering, immunotherapy, and AI-driven biologics – showcasing the tools and partnerships transforming drug discovery and development.

🚧 13.05 | Cybersecurity and clinical risk management in the era of AI | London, UK: Hosted by Royal Society of Medicine, this half-day event is for clinicians, healthcare leaders, and digital health professionals navigating AI's security and clinical risks – with practical guidance from NHS CCIOs on deploying it safely and compliantly.

👩‍🔬 13.05 | Women in Biotech | Macclesfield, UK: A BIA networking event for women in biotech – and their allies – exploring how leaders are navigating organisational change, building resilience, and driving transformation in a sector still emerging from a difficult few years.

🔬 19–21.05 | Bio-IT World Conference & Expo | Boston, USA: A 25-year-old flagship for biopharma, clinical research, and tech leaders – spotlighting informatics, data analytics, and AI-driven tools accelerating precision medicine and drug discovery.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my entomology enthusiasts,

This week, it’s a bug’s life as a creepy-crawly quarantine facility lands in York to shore up the UK’s biosecurity, saffron makes the leap from spice rack to retinal protection, Chiesi stings the US rare disease market with a $1.9bn acquisition, AstraZeneca warms back up to UK investment after a government sweetener, and a blueberry-sized brain implant buzzes into human trials for treatment-resistant depression.

Don’t let the bedbugs bite!

Dodo

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🐜 Insect quarantine unit to be launched at York biotech campus (The Press): Our friends up north are boosting the UK’s biosecurity capabilities with a new state-of-the-art Insect Quarantine Unit for Fera Science Ltd. The facility will support research into invasive invertebrate pests – the sort that chew through crops, ecosystems and biosecurity budgets. The 2,500 sq ft unit is designed to handle the kind of regulated work that requires rather more than a sealed jar and good intentions, with serious implications for food systems and environmental protection.

Our take: The UK has made plenty of noise about leading in crop science, from the Precision Breeding Act to post-EU regulatory divergence. Fera Science's work with DEFRA on invasive non-native species is more than mere research curiosity – after all, you can't set policy on pests you haven't properly studied! York's expanded facility is the unglamorous plumbing behind the UK's biosecurity ambitions, and with 10 to 12 invasive species turning up uninvited each year, more capacity is rather overdue.

🥸 Pharmactive Biotech highlights saffron extract’s clinical efficacy in boosting vision health (Nutrition Insight): Pharmactive has launched AffronEye, a saffron-derived ingredient aimed at retinal protection through antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-apoptotic mechanisms. Preclinical data shows it shields retinal ganglion cells in glaucoma-like models, while delivery formats including liposomal lid mists and eyelid serums are designed to sidestep the compliance problems that plague traditional eye drops.

Our take: Pharmactive is betting that the future of eye wellness lies in ease of application. A natural botanical that feels more like skincare than medicine has clear appeal – in nutraceuticals, poor adherence is the silent killer of otherwise promising interventions, with many users dropping off after just a couple of weeks. Liposomal lid mists and eyelid serums directly address the friction points that make people disengage.

🤑 Chiesi in US$1.9bn deal to buy KalVista and its angioedema drug (European Biotechnology Magazine): Our pasta-loving pals at Chiesi are making their largest acquisition to date, snapping up US biotech KalVista Pharmaceuticals for $1.9bn. The centrepiece is Ekterly (sebetralstat), the first oral on-demand treatment for hereditary angioedema – a condition where existing options are largely injectable. Ekterly has already secured regulatory approval in the US, UK, Japan and EU, generating $49M in its first half-year on market.

Our take: KalVista is Chiesi’s second significant rare disease deal in three years, following the Amryt Pharma buyout in 2023 – with a €430M Milan manufacturing investment and an Arbor gene therapy partnership added for good measure. The methodical deal-making is worth noting: a family-owned company quietly assembling US commercial-stage assets while anchoring its manufacturing base at home, all in service of a €6bn revenue target by 2030.

🇬🇧 AstraZeneca makes surprise U-turn with £300m pharma investment in UK (The Guardian): AstraZeneca has reversed its UK investment freeze, unfreezing a paused £200m Cambridge expansion and committing £100m to a new “lab of the future” in Macclesfield. The U-turn follows months of fractious negotiations over NHS drug pricing and availability. A subsequent UK–US deal, trading tariff-free exports for improved NHS medicine access, appears to have broken the deadlock.

Our take: Since the UK–US pricing deal, £1.4bn in life sciences investment has rolled in from UCB, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim and now AstraZeneca. The terms were straightforward enough: higher NHS drug spending and faster approvals in exchange for investment commitments. Whether this becomes the standard playbook – governments competing for pharma capital by loosening pricing and access conditions – is the rather larger question.

And finally…

🧠 A brain implant for depression is about to be tested in humans (Wired): Motif Neurotech has FDA approval to begin human trials of a blueberry-sized brain implant for treatment-resistant depression. The device targets the central executive network with frequent at-home electrical stimulation, with the company suggesting remission could be achievable within 10 days. Unlike Neuralink’s headline-grabbing communication-restoration work, Motif is aiming squarely at the third of depression patients who don’t respond to existing medication.

Our take: Treatment-resistant depression is a condition that current psychiatry has remarkably little to offer beyond palliation, and a device-based intervention is a meaningful shift. The longer-term implication is that recording-and-stimulating implants could move psychiatric diagnosis from patient self-report to neural telemetry – a significant epistemological change for a field built on subjective accounts, with real consequences for how depression is defined and treated.

Tune in 🎧

🫀 Diagonal Therapeutics’ innovative clustering antibodies for vascular diseases: Diagonal Therapeutics’ CSO Patrick Andre explains how the DIAGONAL platform targets TGF-β signalling, and what a $125M Series B means for rare vasculopathies and beyond.

💡 Implementing a new CEO strategy with NervGen’s Adam Rogers, M.D. and Rich Macary: NervGen's Adam Rogers and Rich Macary discuss NVG-291's path to Phase 3, FDA endpoint strategy, leadership shifts, a Nasdaq move, and the broader potential in neurotrauma.

🥶 The first environmental GE organism release – almost! Dr. Steven Lindow: Dr. Steven Lindow unpacks the pioneering work on ice-minus bacteria, early biotech breakthroughs, regulatory hurdles, and the technology’s evolving role in frost-sensitive agriculture.

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🤖 Business Lead, Life Sciences, OpenAI: Want to turn complex life sciences workflows into transformative partnerships? You'll manage a portfolio of strategic accounts, define market and buyer narratives, and translate deep scientific insight into commercial pathways.

🧑‍🔬 Manager, Life Sciences Strategy Consulting, Kx Advisors: Interested in running multiple client engagements while growing a team of consultants? You'll lead end-to-end project delivery, support business development, serve as a strategic thought partner, and connect teams, clients, and senior leadership.

🌍 Global Change Facilitator, BioPhorum: Passionate about turning cross-industry collaboration into real-world impact? You'll lead workstreams of senior biopharma experts, facilitate complex discussions, drive industry-shaping guidance and benchmarks, and combine structured thinking with project leadership.

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🦠11–15.05 | PEGS Boston | Boston, USA: A flagship conference for protein and antibody engineering, immunotherapy, and AI-driven biologics – showcasing the tools and partnerships transforming drug discovery and development.

🚧 13.05 | Cybersecurity and clinical risk management in the era of AI | Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK: A half-day event for clinicians, healthcare leaders, and digital health professionals navigating AI's security and clinical risks, with practical guidance from NHS CCIOs on deploying it safely and compliantly.

🔬19–21.05 | Bio-IT World Conference & Expo | Boston, USA: A 25-year-old flagship for biopharma, clinical research, and tech leaders – spotlighting informatics, data analytics, and AI-driven tools accelerating precision medicine and drug discovery.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello my fellow mavericks,

This week: Boehringer breaks ranks and builds its AI capabilities rather than buying them, OpenAI debuts a drug discovery model named after the woman who never got the credit she deserved, a Finnish startup defies the odds and pips Harvard and Stanford to a quantum biology prize, Formation Bio tears up the industry playbook to beat the real clinical bottleneck, and a bacterial enzyme goes rogue and writes DNA from its own amino acids.

Vive la révolution,

Dodo

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💂 Boehringer Ingelheim launches AI Accelerator in London (Boehringer Ingelheim): The new King’s Cross hub is the German pharma giant’s fourth computational AI centre and joins a roster of sites in Austria, Germany, and the US under a £150M 10-year investment. Plonked in the Knowledge Quarter alongside the Francis Crick Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, it will focus on patient journey mapping, biological mechanism discovery, and disease driver identification, with a goal of 50 AI experts in place by end of 2027.

Our take: Most pharma is busily snapping up AI capabilities – Novo Nordisk just partnered with OpenAI, Sanofi acquired Exscientia for $1.2B, and Lilly bet $2.75B on Insilico – but Boehringer is having a crack at the rather more patient business of building foundational capability from scratch. Fifty experts by 2027 and £15M a year is a modest opening wager but, if it pays off, the intellectual property and institutional knowledge stay firmly in-house.

🩻 OpenAI debuts AI model GPT-Rosalind to speed up drug discovery (TechTarget): Named after Rosalind Franklin – whose X-ray crystallography helped crack the structure of DNA – the new domain-specific model combines multi-step reasoning across chemistry, genomics, and protein engineering with access to more than 50 scientific tools and databases. Amgen, Moderna, and Thermo Fisher are among the early partners, though access is firmly gated behind a vetted trusted access programme.

Our take: OpenAI’s life sciences research lead Joy Jiao has been rather candid that GPT-Rosalind cannot invent new drugs on its own; it is a reasoning layer for hypothesis generation, literature synthesis, and experimental planning – nothing more. The limited access reflects genuine biosecurity concerns, but also (rather conveniently) positions the model as premium and exclusive at a moment when OpenAI is hungry for enterprise revenue. A fitting name – perhaps this time she'll get the credit she is owed.

⚛️ Helsinki’s Algorithmiq wins €1.7 million prize for quantum-enabled light-sensitive cancer drug discovery (EU-Startups): The sole winner of Wellcome Leap’s 2.5-year Quantum for Bio challenge, pipping finalists from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford to the post, demonstrated a quantum-classical framework for simulating a photosensitiser drug currently in Phase 2 trials. The framework ran on up to 100 qubits on existing IBM hardware and was validated against state-of-the-art classical methods.

Our take: Quantum advantage in drug discovery has been a theoretical promise for the better part of two decades, consistently done in by hardware that couldn’t deliver it. Algorithmiq’s winning framework had to meet three simultaneous requirements: executable on current hardware, biologically meaningful, and validated against classical methods under realistic constraints. That last condition is the one the field has been dodging – passing it, on machines that actually exist, is no small thing.

🎯 This Sam Altman-backed $1.8 billion startup bets AI can get drugs through clinical trials faster (Forbes): Formation Bio has raised $615M to snap up stalled drug candidates and frogmarch them through clinical trials with AI. The New York startup targets pre-Phase 2 drugs, where only 30% succeed, arguing that clinical development rather than discovery is the industry’s real bottleneck. The company has already licensed one asset to Sanofi for $630M, with four more in trials. Backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Our take: Formation’s osteoarthritis drug had already been through three trials across 800 patients, without clear clinical evidence of impact, and was quietly gathering dust. AI didn’t discover anything new – it found signals in data that already existed, establishing that increased cartilage growth from the drug did in fact translate into a lower five-year risk of needing a knee replacement. That’s a rather different proposition from drug discovery AI: not generating new therapies, but rescuing value from ones that were close to being written off. If Formation can do that reliably at scale, the pipeline of abandoned post-Phase 1 assets starts to look rather less like a graveyard.

And finally…

🧬 Scientists stunned by ‘fundamentally new way’ life produces DNA (Science): Stanford researchers have discovered DRT3, a bacterial defence system harbouring an enzyme, Drt3b, that synthesises DNA without a nucleic acid template – instead, using its own amino acids as a guide. Widespread among bacteria, DRT3 appears to protect against viral infection, though precisely how it does so remains a mystery. The researchers hope it can be engineered into a tool for custom DNA synthesis.

Our take: Biology’s “central dogma” – that information flows from nucleic acids to protein, never the other way around – has held for decades. Drt3b doesn’t rewrite it exactly, but a protein serving as its own DNA template has no precedent in biology, and the researchers are candid that they don’t yet know how DRT3 actually defeats viruses. The CRISPR parallel is already being drawn. It, too, started as an obscure bacterial defence mechanism, with applications nobody had imagined.

Tune in 🎧

🎰 The medications that can trigger sex and gambling addictions: A BBC investigation into dopamine agonists examines how roughly 1 in 6 patients develop impulse control disorders, and why many were never warned of the risk.

🐺 Ancient Egyptian DNA, Cheddar Man and wolves as pets: Brian Cox and two ancient DNA specialists field listener questions on how far back genomic analysis can reach, and what early human genetic diversity tells us about survival.

☄️ The Hitchhiking Microbe’s Guide to the Galaxy: Researchers test the plausibility of lithopanspermia – the hypothesis that microbes hitchhike between planets on meteorites – by firing them from a gun to simulate the forces involved.

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🛠️ Development Engineer, Bespak: Want to put the device in drug delivery? You’ll support product design from concept to commercialisation, run CAD simulations, conduct NGI testing, and steer precision-moulded parts through performance and regulatory requirements.

💯 (Fixed Term) Analyst, Quality Control, Chemistry & Stability, Moderna: Can you keep mRNA vaccines in good shape? You’ll run HPLC, UPLC, and stability testing across the product lifecycle, manage LIMS workflows, and keep the brand-new Harwell facility audit-ready.

🧪 Research Scientist, Arthur Edward: Think you can coax microbes into industrial submission? You’ll develop and optimise cell culture processes from lab to pilot scale, apply strain engineering techniques, and drive tech transfer through to commercial manufacture.

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🏥 28.04 | The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits? | London, UK: A closed-door forum bringing together senior NHS, government, healthtech, and employer leaders to tackle the UK’s prevention agenda – from funding models to delivery at scale. Hosted by SomX (that’s us!) and Neko Health.

🇰🇷 29.04 | Bio Korea 2026 | Seoul, South Korea: One of Asia’s leading life sciences gatherings, bringing together biopharma, biotech, and healthtech leaders for partnering, investment, and industry dialogue.

👮13.05 | Cybersecurity and clinical risk management in the era of AI | Royal Society of Medicine, London, UK: A half-day event for clinicians, healthcare leaders, and digital health professionals navigating AI's security and clinical risks with practical guidance from NHS CCIOs on deploying it safely and compliantly.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my nauseous friends,

This week’s roundup has plenty to digest: scientists are taking on “undruggable” disease proteins, pharma backs away from big biotech deals as patent cliffs loom, the UK launches a sovereign AI fund to anchor homegrown biotech talent, Spain eyes Boston for its biotech expansion, and a new study reveals genetic clues to predict severe pregnancy sickness before it strikes.

If that doesn’t settle the stomach, nothing will!

Dodo

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🤑 Biotech startup Neomorph raises $100M to crack the “undruggable” protein problem with molecular glue technology (Tech Startups): For decades, countless disease-driving proteins have been deemed “undruggable”. San Diego biotech Neomorph has raised a $100M Series B to advance molecular glue degraders – compounds that, instead of blocking a protein, bring it into contact with the cell’s natural disposal system to mark it for breakdown. Its lead programme, NEO-811, is now in Phase 1/2 for kidney cancer, with Novo Nordisk, Biogen, and AbbVie among its pharma partners.

Our take: Molecular glue degraders may be scientifically sexy, but nobody’s quite sure where they sit in the regulatory canon. These compounds don’t behave like conventional inhibitors or activators, which means the FDA’s existing frameworks don’t map cleanly onto them – and only a handful have received approval to date. NEO-811’s Phase 1/2 readouts will do more than prove the drug: they’ll help establish what the regulatory bar for this class actually looks like.

🤏 Big pharma is thinking small on deals. That’s a boon for biotech (WSJ): Pharma’s appetite for biotech is stronger than ever, but it’s practising portion control. After an era of megadeals like AbbVie–Allergan and Pfizer–Seagen, pharma is now favouring “bolt-ons”: smaller, strategic acquisitions in the low billions. With nearly half of Big Pharma’s $700B annual revenue facing patent cliffs by 2031, deal sizes may be trimmed – but 2026 is on pace for a record number of them.

Our take: For small and mid-cap biotechs, this is the environment that matters: more acquirers, reasonable valuations, and capital flowing back through the ecosystem rather than pooling in one place. But with a hefty chunk of Big Pharma’s income expiring alongside its patents, it’s clear that its pipelines need refilling. The interesting question is whether pharma will maintain its current discipline as that 2031 deadline approaches, or whether desperation will drive it back to the megadeal.

🤖 AI firms pioneering drug discovery, cheaper supercomputing, and more get first backing through UK’s Sovereign AI (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology): The UK has decided it doesn’t want to just use AI, it wants to own it. Enter Sovereign AI, a £500M state-backed, VC-style unit designed to anchor the country’s most promising AI startups – and their economic value – on British soil. First cheque goes to AI infrastructure startup Callosum, with biotechs Twig Bio and Prima Mente among six further companies receiving supercomputing access, visa fast-tracks, and early access to government procurement.

Our take: This is the state playing venture capitalist – and rather enjoying it! Several of these companies already have US operations, so the question Sovereign AI is really trying to answer isn’t whether founders stay in the UK, but whether the economic value they create does. By bundling capital, compute, talent access, and state leverage (and taking right of first refusal on future funding rounds), the UK is betting it can keep the economic upside – jobs, tax revenue, and strategic capability – here, rather than abroad.

🇪🇸 Spain sets up Boston-focused VC fund with goal of raising $200M for biotechs (Fierce Biotech): Spain is taking its biotech ambitions overseas. Backed by $57M from the Spanish government, the new VC fund will let private investors help Spanish drug developers tap into Boston’s world‑class life sciences ecosystem. The initiative will also establish Spain’s eighth US trade office in Boston and encourage joint R&D and co‑investment projects.

Our take: Boston is sitting on 28% lab vacancy rates and 4,600 job losses, and Spain – whose economy grew 2.8% last year – has clearly been paying attention, moving in precisely when Boston is vulnerable. The deeper ambition (one suspects) is to embed Spanish biotechs into Boston’s infrastructure before they get absorbed by it, reversing the age-old story of promising European companies lost to US acquisition.

And finally…

🫄 Pregnancy sickness study identifies new genetic links (GEN): USC scientists have identified ten genes linked to hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), the severe pregnancy sickness that hospitalises 2% of women – six of them previously unknown. The team previously established that HG is driven by hypersensitivity to GDF15, a hormone that surges in early pregnancy. Their latest multi-ancestry GWAS of over 10,000 cases points to appetite, insulin signalling, and brain plasticity as further mechanisms.

Our take: Zofran, the most effective current treatment, still fails around half of patients – and severe cases can lead to pregnancy termination, depression, and lasting maternal morbidity. Genetic screening before pregnancy could change that calculus entirely, identifying hypersensitive women before symptoms strike rather than after. For a condition dismissed as psychological for decades, prevention (rather than damage control) would be a small mercy.

Tune in 🎧

💊 Biosimilars and complex medicines for all with RNA therapeutics’ Sarfaraz Niazi, PhD: Dr. Niazi unpacks how US biosimilar regulation evolved from early FDA hesitation to citizen petitions and landmark lawsuits.

💩 Tuning, rather than blocking, immunity in IBD: CEO Marc de Garidel traces a drug's unlikely journey – from a shelved HIV candidate to a late-stage IBD treatment offering longer-lasting remission.

🦠 Multi-agent AI delivers reliable and scalable insights for single-cell omics: Parashar Dhapola, co-founder and CEO of Nygen Analytics, on how advanced algorithms are changing the analysis of millions of cells in real time.

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🥼 Department Lead Scientific Communications, BioNTech: Ready to shape how cutting-edge science reaches the world? Build and lead a global team overseeing publications, data strategy, and scientific storytelling across BioNTech’s portfolio – from early development through to commercialisation.

🧑‍⚕️ Manager - Life Sciences and Healthcare, Sia: Deep knowledge of EU and UK grant ecosystems? Lead strategy, capture, and delivery of public and philanthropic funding across programmes including Horizon Europe, HERA, Innovate UK, and Wellcome.

🧬 Territory Account Manager, Illumina: Passionate about genomics and business growth? Expand Illumina’s portfolio across hospitals, universities, and biopharma clients, driving account growth and identifying new opportunities.

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🌱 21.04 | BioSolutions UK | London, UK: Hosted by the BIA, this London event brings together startups, investors, and policymakers to explore how engineering biology is shaping the future bioeconomy.

🏥 28.04 | The Future of Prevention: Who Pays, Who Delivers, Who Benefits? | London, UK: A closed-door forum bringing together senior NHS, government, healthtech, and employer leaders to tackle the UK’s prevention agenda – from funding models to delivery at scale. Hosted by SomX (that’s us!) and Neko Health.

🇰🇷 29.04 | Bio Korea 2026 | Seoul, South Korea: One of Asia’s leading life sciences gatherings, bringing together biopharma, biotech, and healthtech leaders for partnering, investment, and industry dialogue.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Houston, we have a newsletter,

This week, a sugar matrix finally launches vaccines that can bypass the cold chain, MethylScan detects cancer and liver disease for less than the cost of an in-flight meal, Anthropic pays $400M to pull 8 months of stealth biology into its orbit, FebriDx clears for takeoff in 300,000 US outpatient clinics to curb unnecessary antibiotic prescribing, and human cells head to the moon to see how they hold up beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Mission control, Dodo is over and out.

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💉 New drying technique stabilises vital vaccines at room temperature (News Medical): Oxford engineers have validated MART, a room-temperature drying technique that locks proteins into a stable sugar-based matrix on cellulose fibres, neatly sidestepping the freezing that typically does for sensitive biologics. The process takes as little as 3hrs and requires no specialist equipment. Tested across four targets, including COVID-19 diagnostic reagents and growth factors, dried samples retained over 90% of their activity after 6 months at 25°C.

Our take: Cold chain failures waste billions of dollars’ worth of vaccines annually, with a human cost borne by children in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where cold chain infrastructure simply isn’t up to scratch. The problem has been thoroughly catalogued for decades and thoroughly not cracked. MART takes just a few hours and requires no specialist kit. For low-resource settings, the most useful tech is the one that actually makes it off the lorry.

🩸 Low-cost, single sample blood test detects different cancers, liver disorders, and other diseases (GEN): UCLA scientists have developed MethylScan, a blood test that reads DNA methylation patterns in cell-free DNA to sniff out multiple cancers, liver conditions, and organ abnormalities from a single sample. The method works by enzymatically stripping out background DNA from blood cells before sequencing. Across 1,061 patients, it achieved 63% overall cancer detection and 55% for early-stage disease, with 98% specificity, and a projected cost under $20 per sample.

Our take: Galleri, the market leader in multi-cancer detection, costs $949 and isn’t covered by most insurers. MethylScan’s rather more interesting trick is correctly classifying 85% of liver disease patients by type from the same blood draw, distinguishing viral hepatitis from metabolic disease without so much as a biopsy. At 55% early-stage sensitivity, it isn’t miles ahead of Galleri at 51% – suggesting detection is now the unsolved problem, not affordability.

💰 AI giant Anthropic leans into life sciences with $400M Coefficient Bio catch (BioSpace): The all-stock deal folds fewer than 10 people into Anthropic’s healthcare division, bolstering Claude Life Sciences – its biopharma-focused AI platform already used by Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, and AbbVie. Coefficient was founded just eight months ago by Nathan Frey and Samuel Stanton, both from Genentech’s Prescient Design computational drug discovery unit, and had been operating entirely in stealth.

Our take: That much money for an eight-month-old company with no disclosed product raises an eyebrow until you clock what Frey and Stanton built at Genentech – not AI wrappers bolted onto biology, but biological foundation models and protein design infrastructure from the architecture up. That calibre of talent is scarce, and Anthropic’s head of healthcare wants a meaningful percentage of all life science work running on Claude.

🪄 Lumos to access $1b US market with diagnostic device, raises $20m (The Australian): Australian diagnostics company Lumos has secured a CLIA waiver for FebriDx, its point-of-care test that distinguishes viral from bacterial respiratory infections. Previously confined to hospitals and laboratories, the waiver unlocks more than 300,000 outpatient locations, including physician offices, urgent care clinics, and pharmacy settings. The company has raised $20M to fund the US commercial rollout.

Our take: Antibiotic stewardship has spent decades drilling hospitals – the setting that accounts for a minority of prescribing. The bulk of inappropriate prescribing happens in outpatient settings where a clinician has minutes, no diagnostics, and a patient expecting a prescription. A CLIA waiver means FebriDx can now reach the GP surgeries and the pharmacy, the places unintentionally doing a lot of AMR damage.

And finally…

🚀 How NASA’s moon mission could help transform space medicine (Scientific American): NASA’s Artemis II mission is carrying AVATAR, an experiment using organs-on-a-chip – flash-drive-sized devices lined with living human cells that mimic specific organs. The chips contain bone marrow cells from the four Artemis II astronauts, matched against identical chips on Earth. After the mission, single-cell RNA sequencing will measure gene-level changes caused by deep space radiation and microgravity.

Our take: Organs-on-a-chip already sit in 17 of 25 top biopharma companies’ labs, valued for generating human biological data that animal models routinely get wrong. Deep space radiation and microgravity accelerate bone loss, suppress immunity, and damage DNA in ways that mirror accelerated disease states on Earth. That data, collected from astronauts’ own cells against matched Earth controls, is territory no laboratory has reached before.

Tune in 🎧

💊Novartis Buys Excellergy for $2B, Anthropic Vs. Pentagon, The Mansion Section: A condensed cut of TBPN’s live tech coverage, touching on Novartis’s latest acquisition, Anthropic’s Pentagon tensions, and real estate.

🩸This Startup Wants To Catch Cancer Before It Spreads: BillionToOne’s David Tsao and Oguzhan Atay trace the company’s path from prenatal cfDNA screening to early cancer detection, and what a $4B valuation means for the field.

🌕13 Minutes Presents: Artemis II: Tim Peake and Maggie Aderin-Pocock cover NASA’s first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, with updates from Kennedy Space Centre and context on the geopolitics driving the new space race.

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🔬 Entry Level - Clinical Research Associate, Medspace: New to clinical research? You’ll conduct site monitoring visits, verify source data against case report forms, review regulatory documents, and keep adverse event reporting on the right side of GCP.

💼 Head of R&D and Scientific Strategy, Rare Disease, Syneos Health: Keen to shape the scientific direction of a global CRO? Reporting to the CSO, you’ll lead cross-functional initiatives, drive thought leadership strategy, and represent rare disease capabilities in front of customers and C-suite.

🧪 Biotech Application Scientist, Axitan Research UK: Got a nose for formulation science? You’ll translate R&D concepts into scalable feed additive products across poultry, swine, and aquaculture, optimise performance at pilot scale, and feed findings into IP filings.

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🇮🇹 16-17.04 | 16th International Conference on Biotechnology | Rome, Italy: Under the theme “Living Technologies for a Changing World: The Future Begins in Biotechnology,” this global meeting celebrates innovation where biology meets imagination, exploring how living systems can heal, adapt, and drive sustainable transformation across health, energy, and the environment.

💊 16.04 | Frontier Biotech Tables: From Signal to Drug | London, UK: This gathering unites biotech founders, frontier researchers, pharma dealmakers, and investors to dissect what’s really holding back translation, and how to unlock the next generation of ageing therapeutics.

🌱 21.04 | BioSolutions UK | London, UK: Discover how biology is driving real-world solutions to global challenges, and be part of the conversation that’s transforming the future of our planet. Whether you’re a startup, scale-up, investor, industrial leader, or policymaker, there’s something for everyone.

📑 29.04 | The Hardian Health Tech Summit | London, UK: The Hardian team will be joined by representatives from the MHRA, FDA, NICE, NHS leaders, and more across the healthtech world for real-world insight into regulation and market access in medical devices.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hello, my fellow detectives,

This week: Lilly splashes out $7.8bn on a narcolepsy biotech, Blackstone closes the largest life science private fund in history, Amsterdam researchers deliver a patriarchy-smashing anatomical breakthrough, lab gloves have been found to contaminate microplastic samples, and psychedelic startups are under fire for some rather questionable YouTube videos.

Don’t touch anything!

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

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💰Eli Lilly outlays $7.8bn to acquire sleep drug biotech Centessa (Pharmaceutical Technology): Eli Lilly is betting big on neuroscience, with a multi-billion-dollar move to acquire Cambridge-based Centessa Pharmaceuticals. The deal hands Lilly full ownership of cleminorexton, an orexin receptor 2 agonist targeting narcolepsy and other sleep-wake disorders. The drug has already posted strong Phase II results across narcolepsy types 1 and 2 and idiopathic hypersomnia.

Our take: Orexin receptor 2 agonists sit at the top of the sleep-wake hierarchy – addressing the root cause rather than papering over symptoms downstream. Narcolepsy alone is set to exceed 760,000 diagnosed cases across major markets by 2029, and cleminorexton's breadth across sleep-wake indications gives Lilly unusual optionality. For a field that has long struggled to move beyond symptom management, that's worth paying for.

🤑 Blackstone closes $6.3B fund for life sciences investing (BioPharma Dive): Blackstone has closed the largest life sciences private fund in history, roughly 40% bigger than its previous vehicle. With $15 billion in assets under management – and 34 approved medicines and devices – recent investments span gut disease, cancer, and cardiovascular medicine across partners including Teva, Merck, J&J, and Novartis.

Our take: Blackstone’s 86% approval rate for late-stage assets, well above the industry average, suggests a selection discipline that venture capital has struggled to replicate at scale. It’s that track record which makes this shift credible: private equity is now stepping in as the financing layer for late-stage assets that VC finds too capital-intensive, and pharma finds too risky to acquire outright.

♀️Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time (The Guardian): Amsterdam researchers have produced the first-ever 3D map of the clitoral nerve network. The findings could reshape pelvic reconstructive surgery – improving outcomes in FGM repair and vulvar cancer procedures – while raising uncomfortable questions about how one of the body's most complex sensory organs stayed under-researched for so long.

Our take: The clitoral mapping project is a reminder of how thoroughly medical research has neglected female anatomy. The fact that it took nearly three decades after the penile nerve map to achieve equivalent knowledge for the clitoris is a direct reflection of how cultural discomfort and institutional bias have shaped research priorities. It also turns out some of what surgeons have been taught about clitoral anatomy is simply wrong. This new map doesn’t just fill a gap – it corrects the record.

🧤Contamination from lab gloves casts doubt on microplastics crisis (The Times): Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that standard laboratory gloves shed microscopic stearate salts that are virtually indistinguishable from polyethylene under common spectroscopy tests – producing false positives of up to 2,000 particles per square millimetre. It turns out the tools used to detect microplastic contamination have, in fact, been contributing to it!

Our take: Over the past decade, the “microplastics economy” has attracted billions in grants, consulting contracts, and testing technology – all built on data that may have been systematically inflated by the very gloves used to collect it. It's the latest in a series of methodological challenges to the field's most headline-grabbing findings, and the question of which results can still be trusted is becoming harder to avoid. It seems some housekeeping – or rather, lab-keeping – is in order.

And finally…

🧠 Psychedelic biotechs face scrutiny over YouTube promos (STAT): Psychedelic startups Helus Pharma and AtaiBeckley are facing backlash over paid YouTube videos making extraordinary claims about their experimental mental health drugs – including “100% patient improvement,” “rewiring the brain,” and an “FDA golden ticket,” all pinned to Phase 2 data. The videos – paid for by third-party marketing agencies on behalf of both companies – were disclosed, somewhat optimistically, as being for “informational purposes only.”

Our take: Psychedelics have spent years clawing toward mainstream medical acceptance, and both companies are hoping to attract pharma interest. Pinning such bold claims to Phase 2 data – the stage at which trials exist specifically to stress-test such numbers – hands critics exactly the ammunition they’ve been waiting for. Big pharma due diligence teams are not known for their enthusiasm toward targets whose marketing agencies are running ahead of the science.

Tune in 🎧

🦀 Investing in early-stage oncology with Yosemite’s Dan McHugh: Dan discusses how Yosemite backs early oncology science through unrestricted academic grants – and why that model produces better drug discovery than traditional VC.

🧬 HaemaLogiX - precision immunotherapy for multiple myeloma: Dr Rosanne Dunn on the company’s antibody approach to multiple myeloma and plasma cell disorders, and what sets it apart from existing treatments.

🦠 Identity crises, 1 mission: From broken shoulder to biotech career: Dr Nicole Paulk shares her unlikely path from the Pacific Northwest to leading AAV-based immunogene therapy for solid tumours.

Apply ✍️

A trio of account manager roles this week - what a treat!

🧑‍🔬 Account Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Got a knack for building relationships in science? Drive growth across CMD products, support customer partnerships, and help deliver solutions across health, environmental protection, and food safety.

🤖 Senior Account Manager, Global AI and Technology, Oxford PharmaGenesis: Keen to shape how AI gets embedded in medical communications? Lead digital and tech projects, develop new tools, and mentor teams across global accounts.

🌍 Global Strategic Account Manager, Cytiva: Ready to work at the intersection of pharma and strategy? Partner with senior account directors to execute complex global strategies, lead governance meetings, and manage cross-functional programmes – with a clear pathway toward account leadership.

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🇮🇹 16-17.04 | 16th International Conference on Biotechnology | Rome, Italy: Under the theme “Living Technologies for a Changing World: The Future Begins in Biotechnology,” this global meeting celebrates innovation where biology meets imagination, exploring how living systems can heal, adapt, and drive sustainable transformation across health, energy, and the environment.

💊 16.04 | Frontier Biotech Tables: From Signal to Drug | London, UK: This gathering unites biotech founders, frontier researchers, pharma dealmakers, and investors to dissect what’s really holding back translation, and how to unlock the next generation of ageing therapeutics.

🌱 21.04 | BioSolutions UK | London, UK: Discover how biology is driving real-world solutions to global challenges, and be part of the conversation that’s transforming the future of our planet. Whether you’re a startup, scale-up, investor, industrial leader, or policymaker, there’s something for everyone.

📑 29.04 | The Hardian Health Tech Summit | London, UK: The Hardian team will be joined by representatives from the MHRA, FDA, NICE, NHS leaders, and more across the healthtech world for real-world insight into regulation and market access in medical devices.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.

Hi there, my fellow latecomers,

This week, several things that probably should have happened sooner. Data tracking on drug websites lands in court, tumours turn out to have been signalling their location all along, a new antibody goes after amyloid deposits already sitting in the heart, Oryon bets on fully differentiated neurons over the progenitor cells most rivals favour, and a prostate cancer test finally folds ethnicity into the diagnostic equation.

Better late than never,

Dodo

If there’s anything you’d like to see in future editions of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

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⚖️ Patient sues Novartis, claiming data-tracking privacy breach (pharmaphorum): A Vermont cancer patient alleges Novartis’s Kisqali product website used tracking pixels to share her private health information with Google and ContentSquare without her consent. The data – inferred from her site visit and savings card application – promptly landed her targeted adverts related to her condition. The complaint, which names trackers on five Novartis product websites, targets violations of HIPAA and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Our take: Most pixel-tracking litigation has focused on health systems, pharmacies, and prescription platforms – all HIPAA-covered entities. Novartis sits outside that framework, which is jolly convenient (until it isn’t). Its product websites aren’t bound by the same rules, yet a visit to a breast cancer drug page is arguably a key diagnostic tell. Now that a suitably prominent defendant has arrived, it might be time to test state privacy laws and close the federal loophole.

🦠 Immunotherapy for solid tumours enhanced by metabolite-sensing receptors (GEN): Stanford researchers have equipped NK and T cells with tumour-homing G-protein coupled receptors (thGPRs) that recognise metabolites released by proliferating cancer cells – including phospholipids, fatty acids, and cholesterol derivatives – and use them as a homing signal. In mouse models of breast and ovarian cancer, the engineered cells navigated directly to tumours, markedly improving control and survival.

Our take: CAR-T’s exhaustion problem has long dominated the field, but this research reframes solid tumour failure as partly a navigation problem. Cancer cells release metabolites as a byproduct of rapid proliferation, and those same metabolites recruit immunosuppressive cells that shield the tumour from attack. Stanford’s lot have engineered killer cells to follow those metabolites directly into the tumour instead. Maybe the answer to CAR-T exhaustion in solid tumours was never about endurance – just better directions.

🫀 UK biotech co-founded by Nobel laureate secures $86M for antibody program (Endpoints): Cambridge-based Immutrin is having a crack at a gap that no approved therapy has yet managed to fill – clearing amyloid deposits already lodged in the hearts of cardiomyopathy patients. The company was co-founded by Professor Daniel Christ, Sir Mark Pepys, whose research underpins the approach, and Sir Gregory Winter, whose Nobel-winning phage display technique was used to precisely engineer the lead antibody. The Series A will fund proof-of-concept trials.

Our take: Currently, approved treatments for this type of amyloidosis cardiomyopathy – stabilisers like Vyndaqel and Attruby, silencers like vutrisiran – work upstream, preventing new fibrils from forming. None of them touch what's already lodged in the heart. Immutrin's antibody recruits the immune system to clear existing deposits, opening the tantalising possibility of reversing damage rather than merely arresting it. If combined, treatment could become a two-pronged attack.

🧠 Oryon shines out of stealth with $21M to fight Parkinson’s disease (Fierce Biotech): Massachusetts-based biotech has closed its Series A, bringing total funding to $42M, for its stem cell therapy for Parkinson’s. Rather than the progenitor cells favoured by most rivals, Oryon uses the patient’s own stem cells to grow fully differentiated A9 neurons – the dopamine-producing cells whose degeneration drives Parkinson’s motor symptoms. Five patients in an ongoing Phase 1b/2a trial have shown motor score improvements ranging from 29% to 62% above baseline, six to 18 months after treatment.

Our take: Deriving neurons from a patient’s own cells sidesteps immunosuppression entirely – an advantage the allogeneic lot can’t claim. Five patients is a slim cohort, but the unilateral approach quietly does something useful: treating only one side of the brain creates a within-patient control, allowing dopamine restoration and motor recovery to be tracked against the untreated hemisphere. That unilateral treatment is already comparing favourably with bilateral approaches makes the next cohort worth watching.

And finally…

🍑 Trinity Biotech announces successful clinical results for its enhanced EpiCapture™ prostate cancer test (Yahoo): The Dublin-based company has reported an AUC of 85% for an enhanced version of its EpiCapture urine liquid biopsy test for aggressive prostate cancer, validated across 750 patient samples. The upgraded test incorporates a machine learning algorithm that factors in patient ethnicity alongside DNA biomarkers – the first prostate cancer diagnostic to do so. Commercialisation is planned through Trinity's New York reference laboratory.

Our take: Black men die from prostate cancer at twice the rate of white men, in part because prostate-specific antigen (PSA) thresholds in clinical guidelines were calibrated against white populations with naturally lower baseline levels – meaning the same score can mask meaningfully different levels of risk, depending on the patient. Most diagnostics treat ethnicity as a confounding variable to smooth away. Accounting for it meaningfully in clinical decision-making is long overdue.

Tune in 🎧

🎗️ How Evolution is Shaping Cancer Research: Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the science behind some of the most promising projects Cancer Research UK is currently supporting, from early detection to novel therapeutics.

🤖 NHSE’s tough message on tech: Tech sits at the heart of the government's 10-Year Health Plan, but NHS England has warned that a leadership void is slowing delivery across everything from EPR rollouts to AI adoption.

👩🏻‍💻 The Future of Tech Transfer: News roundup with NIH funding shifts, plus insights from Heather Steinman and Carole Burns on the future of tech transfer and commercialising research.

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🤝 Scientific Consultant, Genedata: Like helping scientists make sense of messy data? Guide biopharma teams using the Genedata Screener, blending science, tech, and project work to shape how biological data is analysed and applied.

🎬 Director, Competitive Intelligence, Envision Pharma: Got a sharp eye for pharma strategy? Lead high-value intelligence projects, build senior client relationships, and turn insights into growth across biotech and pharma accounts.

🧪 Chief Scientist – IHC & FISH, Leica Biosystems: Expert in tissue diagnostics? Set scientific direction across IHC and FISH, driving innovation, assay development, and translational strategy in advanced pathology technologies.

RSVP 📆

🇮🇹 16-17.04 | 16th International Conference on Biotechnology | Rome, Italy: A global gathering exploring how living systems can address challenges across health, energy, and the environment, from novel therapeutics to sustainable industrial applications.

🌱 21.04 | BioSolutions UK | London, UK: Hosted by the BIA, this London event brings together startups, investors, and policymakers to explore how engineering biology is shaping the future bioeconomy.

📑 29.04 | The Hardian Health Tech Summit | London, UK: Regulators from the MHRA, FDA, and NICE join NHS leaders and industry professionals for real-world insight into regulation and market access in medical devices.

Got news, jobs or events you think are worth coo-ing over? Post an event here, or email us at biotechdodo@substack.com!

We’re SomX – a communications and creative agency trusted by biotech, pharma and healthtech pioneers. We craft strategy, content, PR and design that translate complex biology into compelling stories and investor‑ready excitement. Get in touch to amplify your science beyond the lab bench.