Hello, my fellow gym-goers,

This week has been a full-body workout in the world of biotech: Novartis has walked out on its BioArctic deal, Lonza has bulked up stateside with five Merck KGaA sites, a protein that protects the “glue” inside eggs could boost IVF for older women, vibrating mattresses could help shake Alzheimer’s protein out of the brain, and Joe Wicks meets Frankenstein as scientists build tiny robots powered by living muscle.

Don’t skip leg day!

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🥶 BioArctic left out in the cold as Novartis walks away from $800M neuro collab (Fierce Biotech): Just 14 months after signing a deal worth up to $800M to deliver one of its antibodies across the blood-brain barrier using BioArctic’s BrainTransporter technology, Novartis has turned its back on Swedish biotech BioArctic. The pharma company says the decision followed a review of its early research priorities rather than any safety or efficacy concerns, but the exit comes amid wider pipeline setbacks alongside Novartis’ recent $125M acquisition of Sironax’s rival brain-delivery platform.

Our take: The collapse of Novartis’ BioArctic partnership highlights the uneven economics of biotech dealmaking. For Novartis, $30M bought time to evaluate a potentially valuable delivery platform without committing to its full development, whilst for BioArctic, $772M of the headline $800M depended on milestones that will now never materialise. As pharma increasingly uses milestone-based partnerships, smaller biotechs signing similar deals face real uncertainty over how much of that money they will actually see.

💰 Lonza agrees to buy 5 Merck KGaA facilities to accelerate US expansion (BioSpace): Lonza is set to more than double its US manufacturing footprint with the acquisition of five Merck KGaA facilities, in a deal worth several hundred million Swiss francs. The sites strengthen Lonza’s capabilities in antibody-drug conjugates, viral vectors and fill-finish manufacturing, positioning it to capitalise on high demand for complex biologics, and are expected to generate CHF 250M in sales in 2028.

Our take: The deal says as much about Merck KGaA as it does about Lonza. The revenue-generating sites predominantly make drugs for other companies, but Lonza’s CEO says they are running “way below” their potential. Merck would rather focus on its core Life Science business than fill that capacity, while Lonza sees it as room to grow – and is prepared to accept thinner margins until the sites hit peak sales in the mid-2030s.

🥚 Egg ‘glue’ could boost IVF success for older women (The Times): Scientists have identified a protein that could help slow age-related fertility decline by protecting the molecular structures that keep chromosomes organised inside eggs. Researchers at Japan’s Chiba University found that restoring the protein OMC1 in mice partly recovered chromosome cohesion and reduced abnormalities associated with infertility and miscarriage. The findings suggest a potential new approach to improving egg quality and IVF outcomes in older women.

Our take: Because eggs can be handled and assessed outside the body, IVF is the fastest route from mouse data to human application. But that creates a novel regulatory category: a treatment intended not to create a pregnancy directly, but to reduce chromosomal errors in a single human egg before fertilisation. Regulators, embryologists and ethics bodies would need to decide what evidence is enough to call an egg “improved”.

🛌 Vibrating mattress helps clear Alzheimer’s protein from the brain (New Scientist): Researchers at the University of Oulu have identified a potential approach to clearing an Alzheimer’s-related protein from the brain, combining whole-body vibration with nitric oxide-releasing medication. In a study of 29 healthy adults, blood levels of beta-amyloid 42 rose by 35% after the intervention, suggesting faster clearance by the brain’s glymphatic waste-disposal system. Clinical trials are planned to determine whether these effects translate into meaningful clinical benefits.

Our take: The method relies on blood vessels widening and squeezing more strongly, and was tested in healthy adults. However, many people with Alzheimer’s have amyloid building up in the walls of their brain’s blood vessels, which makes them stiffer and more fragile, raising questions about whether those vessels can respond to vibration and nitric oxide, and whether forcing them carries a bleeding risk.

And finally…

💪 Real muscles let tiny robots jump, swim, and grasp (Futurity): Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed biohybrid robots powered by lab-grown mouse muscle tissue, which are capable of jumping, swimming, walking and grasping objects. By using computer simulations to optimise how living muscle interacts with 3D-printed hydrogel scaffolds, the team achieved up to 11 times greater range of motion than earlier systems with a comparable amount of muscle. The research represents a significant advance in biohybrid robotics; however, challenges remain around sustaining the living tissue.

Our take: These devices sit in the awkward grey zone between a machine and a living organism. While the work stays in the lab, questions like how the tissue will be kept alive can be kicked down the road; however, if the technology moves towards larger systems with artificial blood supplies, regulators (and scientists) will have to decide exactly what they’re dealing with.

Tune in 🎧

🦀 Translating a new discovery into a novel cancer therapy with Grid Therapeutics’ Ned Patz, M.D.: Grid’s co-founder covers GT103’s origins, the challenges of securing funding for new cancer treatments, and the leadership lessons of building a lean biotech with two clinical-stage programmes.

📈 Biotech market outlook: M&A, AI, IPOs and clinical breakthroughs: A panel of analysts examine pharma dealmaking prospects, Alnylam’s commercial challenges, AI’s growing role in drug development and shifting investor appetite.

🧬 Genprex bets on a one-time gene therapy for diabetes (Part 3 of 3): Genprex’s CEO discusses the company’s shift from oncology into diabetes, the realities of scaling gene therapy manufacturing, and competing with GLP-1 therapies in the evolving metabolic disease market.

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💡 Technical Project Lead, Indegene: Interested in leading digital marketing projects for global healthcare brands? You’ll coordinate client stakeholders and international delivery teams, overseeing content production, web development and campaign execution to ensure projects run smoothly and meet commercial objectives. (UK)

🧑‍🔬 Lead In Silico Business Partner, Biology, Evotec: Passionate about shaping the future of AI-driven drug discovery? You’ll lead the integration of AI and computational biology across global research programmes, using proprietary multi-omics data to accelerate target identification, validation and precision medicine development. (UK or Italy)

🎷 Associate Director, Epidemiology, Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Keen to turn real-world data into evidence for rare cancers? You’ll design natural history studies and external control arms for oncology programmes spanning rare haematological cancers and solid tumours, lead post-marketing studies and author the epidemiology sections of global regulatory documents. (UK or US – remote)

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A London special!

🔬 10.11 | Genomics and Precision Medicine Congress 2026 | London, UK: A one-day congress bringing together genomics leaders, clinicians and researchers to explore how genomics and precision medicine can move from research into routine clinical care.

🇬🇧 10-11.11 | Global Pharma and Biotech Summit 2026 | London, UK: Hosted by the Financial Times, the conference brings together global industry leaders, investors and journalists to discuss US-China geopolitical tensions and the rise of India and China as innovation hubs.

🏙️ 15-20.11 | London Life Sciences Week 2026 | London, UK: A week of 100+ networking, dealmaking and innovation events across central London, bringing together investors, founders, policymakers and business leaders from around the world.

💷 16.11 | LSX Investival Showcase London | London, UK: The opening event of London Life Sciences Week, connecting life science executives with capital and partners through showcases and 1:1 partnering meetings.

💂 18-19.11 | London Biotechnology Show | London, UK: Europe’s flagship red biotechnology event, bringing together global biotech leaders, researchers and investors to explore healthcare innovation, forge partnerships and accelerate investment across the life sciences sector.

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 zombie hunters,

It’s been a ghoulish week in the world of biotech: Novartis takes a horrifying $1.9B hit on a phase 3 flop, Artiva axes 94% of its workforce following patient safety concerns, Ferring conjures up a deal that could slash IVF hormone injections, a creature from the deep takes on brain-eating amoebas, and vaccines targeting skin-bacteria proteins could exorcise acne.

Don’t get too spooked!

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🪦 Novartis CEO keeps faith in Avidity deal despite taking $1.9B hit from del-desiran fail (Fierce Biotech): Novartis is defending its $12B acquisition of Avidity Biosciences after del-desiran, the centrepiece of the deal, failed a pivotal phase 3 trial in myotonic dystrophy type 1, triggering a $1.9B partial impairment charge. It is the latest in a string of blows for Novartis, following disappointing phase 3 results for cardiovascular drug pelacarsen and safety concerns that paused the company’s own CAR-T programme. Despite mounting clinical setbacks, Novartis has raised its full-year profit guidance and insists its acquisition strategy remains unchanged.

Our take: Novartis’s nearly $2B hit on del-desiran came in the same financial results in which it lifted its profit forecasts, illustrating a key structural advantage enjoyed by big pharma: diversified revenues allow it to absorb multiple expensive clinical failures. But the deal isn’t dead yet! Novartis plans another pivotal study of del-desiran, and two other Avidity drugs (del-zota and del-brax) are still in development, making it a dented bet rather than a lost one.

💀 After 2 patient deaths and cell therapy durability concerns, Artiva cuts 94% of workforce (BioSpace): Artiva Biotherapeutics is abandoning development of its lead NK cell therapy, AlloNK, following two patient deaths and concerns over the durability of clinical responses. Despite achieving substantial B-cell depletion in combination with rituximab in rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases, the treatment failed to deliver sufficiently sustained clinical responses. The decision ends plans for a pivotal phase 3 trial and will see the company cut the majority of its workforce.

Our take: Artiva’s setback raises a deeper scientific question about whether removing B cells can reliably reset the immune system or whether the underlying autoimmune processes eventually re-establish themselves. As developers pursue increasingly sophisticated cell therapies for autoimmune diseases, the gap between profound immune-cell depletion and delivering sustained disease remission could become critical.

😈 Ferring to buy fertility biotech Gameto for up to $1.38 billion (European Biotechnology Magazine): The deal would give the Swiss pharma group a stem cell-based technology that could reduce the hormone injections required for IVF and egg freezing. Gameto’s Fertilo platform uses engineered ovarian support cells to mature eggs outside the body, meaning hormonal stimulation could last between one and three days instead of around two weeks. The technology is undergoing phase 3 testing in the US.

Our take: Ferring’s acquisition of Gameto presents an unusual strategic contradiction. The company already sells fertility hormones, including Menopur, yet Fertilo is designed to dramatically reduce the need for precisely those treatments. This could represent a deliberate attempt to control the transition away from hormone-intensive IVF before a competitor disrupts its existing business. Better the devil you own than the devil you don’t!

🧟 Marine molecule may help combat “brain-eating” amoeba (UC San Diego Today): A compound isolated from marine bacteria could offer a new weapon against one of the world’s deadliest infections. Researchers at UC San Diego have shown that rutamycin B can kill Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating monster amoeba behind primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a disease with a fatality rate exceeding 97%. The compound works four times faster than the current standard treatment and is significantly more selective for the parasite than human cells. (Read the Marine Drugs paper)

Our take: PAM destroys brain tissue so fast that patients typically die around five days after symptoms appear, so a drug that works in four hours (vs 16) could buy crucial time. However, rutamycin B has only been tested on amoebae in a dish, and nobody yet knows whether it can cross the blood–brain barrier to reach the infection. Its most promising role may in fact be as a partner to amphotericin B, the standard PAM treatment, whose use is limited by kidney toxicity; pairing the two drugs cut its dose by up to 60 times.

And finally…

🧛 Vaccines could be about to revolutionise acne treatments (New Scientist): Acne may be caused not by skin bacteria themselves, but by the immune system overreacting to proteins they release. Sanofi and US biotech Armora Biosciences are separately developing acne vaccines based on this hypothesis, targeting proteins from Cutibacterium acnes, the most common bacterium on human skin. The vaccines aim to neutralise specific inflammatory triggers while preserving beneficial skin microbes. Early animal studies have shown promising results.

Our take: The finding that acne-linked and healthy-skin strains of C. acnes produce different forms of hyaluronidase suggests that acne may not be a single biological condition, but a collection of inflammatory responses driven by different bacterial populations. This could create an opportunity for precision dermatology, where patients are selected for specific treatments based on the genetic and functional characteristics of their skin microbiome.

Tune in 🎧

💪 GLP-1 muscle loss: the next battleground in obesity treatment (Part 2 of 3): Atrogi’s CEO discusses the limitations of existing GLP-1 therapies, the science behind the company’s experimental drug ATR-258, and how smaller biotechs can stand up to the pharma giants in the fast-moving metabolic disease market.

🖨️ Bioprinting 3D human tissue to discover and test new treatments with Viscient Bio’s Keith Murphy: This episode explores how scaffold-free bioprinting and human tissue models could improve drug safety predictions, advance disease modelling and reduce reliance on animal testing. No Frankenstein required!

⚠️ Capitol gains: Confronting biotech’s policy risks: Incubate’s founder unpacks what’s keeping biotech investors up at night, from FDA leadership instability and drug-pricing policies to declining federal research funding and China’s growing biotech sector.

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🌍 Sr. Manager, Global Comp, Johnson & Johnson MedTech: Got a sixth sense for fair pay? You’ll lead an international team to design and implement competitive pay programmes, and strengthen pay equity and governance.

📚 CPO Learning Experience Head, GSK: Passionate about developing talent in the pharmaceutical industry? You’ll own the global learning and capability strategy across the CPO organisation, partnering with R&D, commercial and medical teams.

🎩 Senior Director, Gilead Patient Solutions Public Affairs, Gilead Sciences: Want to shape global healthcare policy and patient access? You’ll drive public affairs strategy across nearly 140 countries, advising senior leadership and working with government affairs, patient advocacy and communications teams.

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🤝 9–11.11 | BIO-Europe 2026 | Cologne, Germany: Europe’s largest and longest-running partnering conference for the global biotechnology and biopharma industry, connecting thousands of executives, researchers and investors.

🧬 10.11 | Genomics and Precision Medicine Congress 2026 | London, UK: International experts and national genomics leaders gather to improve how genomic medicine is researched and put into practice.

📰 10–11.11 | Global Pharma and Biotech Summit 2026 | London, UK: The Financial Times’ annual summit brings together pharma leaders, investors and policymakers to explore geopolitical disruption, AI, regulation and the rise of new innovation hubs.

🏙️ 15–20.11 | London Life Sciences Week 2026 | London, UK: More than 70 events across central London covering life sciences networking, dealmaking and innovation.

🔬 18–19.11 | London Biotechnology Show | London, UK: Europe’s flagship red biotechnology event, bringing together global biotech leaders, researchers and investors to explore healthcare innovation, forge partnerships and accelerate investment across the life sciences sector.

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 selfie snappers

This week’s biotech camera roll has Merck snapping up a rare blood cancer treatment for billions, Roche hitting pause on its operations in Germany while zooming in on China, stress triggering arthritis flare-ups in mice, an AI tool predicting cancer survival from a single selfie, and noise-cancelling headphones helping patients feel less queasy.

Say cheese, and keep a sick bag handy!

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🩸 Merck KGaA spends $1.3bn to buy siRNA specialist Silence Therapeutics (Pharmaceutical Technology): Merck KGaA has acquired UK-based Silence Therapeutics in a deal that values the biotech at an 82% premium. The main attraction is divesiran, an experimental siRNA treatment for rare blood cancer polycythemia vera, which achieved an 88% clinical response rate in Phase II trials. The acquisition also gives Merck access to Silence’s wider RNA interference platform and strengthens its growing rare disease portfolio.

Our take: Silence joins a growing list of British biotechs bought by overseas pharma companies. The timing is telling. Silence raised $175M following its Phase II results in August, then agreed to sell two months later, saying Merck has the scale to take divesiran through Phase III. Investors get a welcome exit, but once again a promising British drug will cross the finish line under someone else’s flag.

🎯 $15 billion deal: Roche bets on China — and questions Germany’s future (European Biotechnology Magazine): The Swiss pharma giant has expanded its partnership with Hansoh Pharma, committing $400m upfront to access a portfolio of experimental cancer therapies and its antibody-drug conjugate technology. The agreement reflects China’s growing influence as a source of pharmaceutical innovation, even as Beijing considers tighter controls on exporting strategic biotech technologies. Meanwhile, Roche has paused new investment decisions in Germany, citing an increasingly challenging policy environment.

Our take: As ever, the devil is in the deal details, which suggests Roche will propose the targets, Hansoh will build the drugs and run early trials, and then Roche will jump back in to handle business outside Greater China. Because Beijing’s proposed export rules are likely to leave room for licensing, Western pharma will still be able to buy China’s medicines, even if development stays firmly rooted in China.

🐭 Psychological stress triggers arthritis flares in mice via IL-6-dependent pathway (GEN): Researchers at Chiba University have identified a biological pathway linking psychological stress to rheumatoid arthritis in mice. Stress activates the sympathetic nervous system, prompting the release of inflammatory signals that reactivate immune responses in previously affected joints, so this study could offer a potential explanation for stress-related arthritis flare-ups.

Our take: Intriguingly, the findings suggest rheumatoid arthritis could leave a lasting molecular imprint on joint tissue, indicating that remission may be more like a dormant disease state that stress signals elsewhere in the body can reactivate, rather than a return to biological normality as previously thought. If researchers replicate these findings in human studies, we could be on the cusp of understanding how tissues retain inflammatory memory.

📸 New AI tool can predict cancer survival by a single patient selfie, study suggests (The Guardian): Researchers at Mass General Brigham have developed an AI system that estimates biological age and predicts cancer survival from facial photographs. Trained on more than 40 million images, the technology identified a 21% higher mortality risk among patients appearing at least five years older than their chronological age. Further validation is of course required, but it does open the door to use of facial analysis to support clinical assessments and treatment decisions.

Our take: With the study finding that heavy drinking, drug use and smoking all correlated with a higher algo-assigned biological age, it shows that the face can be a window for not just how much physical reserve someone might have, but also how their life has been lived. It raises some interesting, if not difficult, questions about health equity when we can accurately measure lifelong disadvantage as a factor in health, rather than just a person’s underlying capacity to withstand treatment.

And finally…

👂Noise-cancelling headphones prevent vomiting after surgery (The New Scientist): A study of 192 patients in China found that wearing noise-blocking ear defenders during surgery reduced postoperative nausea and vomiting from 52% to 35% within 48 hours, despite all patients receiving anti-nausea medication. It’s thought that the brain may keep processing sound under general anaesthesia, triggering a stress response that contributes to nausea. This points to a potential low-cost way to aid recovery without additional medication.

Our take: During the research, the operating theatre noise levels were also tracked, and were surprisingly normal, averaging 66 decibels, which is roughly the level of a normal conversation - and yet blocking those ordinary sound levels still cut nausea by about a third. This study included only women undergoing the same surgery, so the next step is to see whether the results hold true in a larger, multi-site trial that measured nervous system activity alongside noise.

Tune in 🎧

💊 Investing in tomorrow’s CNS breakthroughs with Breyer Capital’s Bret Bostwick, M.D: This latest episode explored the challenges of developing CNS therapies, the limitations of animal models, lessons from Alnylam on genetically validated drug targets, and the opportunities and risks of AI in early-stage biotech.

🫄 A gut-level pivot from diabetes to a GLP-1 off-ramp: Fractyl Health co-founder and CEO Harith Rajagopalan discusses the company’s experimental Revita procedure, designed to regenerate the duodenal lining, its shift from type 2 diabetes to preventing weight regain after GLP-1 treatment, and the potential to reset metabolic regulation.

📉 Biotech market volatility, clinical trial setbacks and emerging therapies: Guest panel Graig Suvannavejh, Paul Matteis, Brian Skorney, Yaron Werber and Jake Becraft examine biotech market performance, investor uncertainty and M&A prospects, alongside clinical developments in pulmonary fibrosis, coeliac disease, neurodegeneration and pancreatic cancer.

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🧑‍🔬 Senior Formulation Scientist, Rosemont Pharmaceuticals: Are you experienced in pharmaceutical formulation development? In this role, you’ll develop and optimise generic medicines from initial concept through commercial launch, and support successful product development across UK, EU, and US markets.

🤑 Director, Budgets and Forecasting, Teva Pharmaceuticals: Interested in shaping the financial strategy behind clinical trials? You’ll oversee trial budgets and forecasts across GCO and EPIX, establish consistent financial planning processes, and work with clinical teams and finance to improve forecast accuracy.

🥼Executive Director, Clinical Pharmacology Services Quality Assurance, Fortrea: Are you passionate about leading quality and regulatory compliance across clinical research? This senior position will involve driving forward QA strategy within Fortrea’s Clinical Pharmacology Services business, strengthening audit and inspection readiness, and delivering continuous improvement.

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🇳🇱 27-28.10 | World Orphan Drug Congress Europe | Amsterdam, Netherlands: An international rare disease and orphan drug meeting, featuring biotech, pharma, policymakers and researchers across cell and gene therapy, diagnostics, market access and real-world evidence.

🇩🇪 9-11.11 | BIO-Europe 2026 | Cologne, Germany: Europe’s largest and longest-running partnering conference for the global biotechnology and biopharma industry, connecting thousands of executives, researchers, and investors

🇬🇧 10-11.11 | Global Pharma and Biotech Summit 2026 | London, UK: The conference brings together global industry leaders, investors, and journalists to discuss US-China geopolitical tensions and the rise of India and China as innovation hubs.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 tattoo artists,

It’s been an ink-teresting week in the world of biotech: big pharma braces for waves of patent expiries over the next few years, Pfizer stakes $500M on emerging protein degrader treatments, scientists create light-sensitive disappearing tattoos, a new antipsychotic for schizophrenia unveils promising phase 2 results, and an anti-ageing skin treatment could give our skin’s biological clock a two-year touch-up.

May your ink never run dry!

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🤑 Pharma’s $500B patent problem will come in waves – not as a cliff (BioPharma Dive): Big Pharma is approaching a major patent cliff, and the race to replace its blockbuster drugs is intensifying. Some $99B in sales could face generic competition in 2028 alone, including Merck’s cancer blockbuster Keytruda, with exposure set to peak at $158B in 2031. With expiries arriving in waves rather than all at once, the industry is now rushing to bring new treatments to market before revenues erode.

Our take: The looming loss of billions of dollars in protected drug sales could fundamentally change the negotiating power in pharmaceutical dealmaking. Companies like Merck and AbbVie face increasingly fixed deadlines to replace blockbuster revenues, and they are already spending to meet them – Merck has announced $30.9B across six deals since the start of 2024, and AbbVie $22.3B. As those deadlines approach, biotech companies with promising late-stage assets could find themselves in a stronger position.

💡 Pfizer pens $500M Enodia pact to join Lilly in emerging protein degrader field (Fierce Biotech): Pfizer has signed a half-a-billion-dollar deal with French biotech Enodia Therapeutics, a week after Eli Lilly formed an $870M pact with Gate Bioscience. Both biotechs are developing protein degraders that target Sec61, a channel proteins pass through on their way to the cell surface; blocking it means disease-causing proteins are broken down before they can cause damage. Long considered difficult to target safely, Sec61 is now emerging as a promising new therapeutic target in cancer, inflammation and immunology.

Our take: Historically, Sec61 has been considered too fundamental to cellular function to inhibit safely. The recent investments by Pfizer and Lilly suggest growing confidence that selective inhibition can overcome that limitation. Kezar Life Sciences has already shown safe Sec61 inhibition is possible in a phase 1 solid tumour trial, so the question is shifting from whether the channel can be targeted to where; however, neither Enodia nor Gate has yet disclosed which diseases their deals cover.

🫟 Chemists create full-colour tattoos that can turn on and off (C&EN): Scientists have developed a rewritable tattoo ink that can change colour or disappear in response to light. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder created PhotoTat using nanoparticles containing light-sensitive dyes that can be switched on and off using UV and visible light. The technology could let tattoos be redesigned without removal; however, questions around long-term stability, safety and production costs remain before commercialisation. (Read the paper in Matter & Light)

Our take: The most significant innovation may be the ability to store and alter visual information directly within the skin. PhotoTat’s nanoparticles effectively turn skin into a rewritable optical surface, suggesting possibilities far beyond decorative tattoos. Building on the team’s earlier work on radiation-sensing inks, future versions could encode medical information or flag environmental exposure, appearing only when activated.

🧠 Tortugas’ Phase IIb schizophrenia trial of obuprazine meets primary endpoint (Clinical Trials Arena): Tortugas Neuroscience’s schizophrenia drug obuprazine has met its main goal in a phase 2b trial run by its partner, Hansoh Pharma. In 363 recently hospitalised adults in China, all three doses significantly reduced symptoms compared with placebo after six weeks, with the lowest dose (1.5–3mg) performing best and cutting symptom scores by 16.7 points more than placebo. Tortugas now plans to pursue US clinical trials in what its CEO calls a market with significant unmet need.

Our take: The approval of Cobenfy has revived interest in developing new approaches to schizophrenia, but Tortugas is pursuing a different strategy. Obuprazine targets established dopamine and serotonin pathways, raising the possibility that improvements in receptor selectivity and pharmacological profiles could deliver meaningful clinical advances without new mechanisms of action. If its early efficacy and tolerability hold up, it could strengthen the case for revisiting established psychiatric targets.

And finally…

🪞 A new anti-ageing drug looks to turn back the clock on skin age (Wired): California biotech Rubedo Life Sciences has reported early evidence that targeting senescent cells could reverse some biological markers of skin ageing. In a small clinical study of 11 people with eczema, its experimental cream reduced the estimated biological age of participants’ skin by an average of two years after four weeks, alongside improvements in collagen and inflammatory markers. The treatment targets damaged ‘zombie cells’ associated with ageing and tissue deterioration.

Our take: Rubedo’s reported two-year reduction in skin age depends on an epigenetic clock (a test that estimates biological age from chemical marks on DNA) developed by Mitra Bio. As longevity treatments advance, companies that measure biological ageing could become increasingly influential in determining which therapies appear effective. However, many research groups and companies are developing their own ageing clocks (and experts caution that it isn’t always clear what each one measures), raising questions about reproducibility, standardisation and clinical relevance.

Tune in 🎧

🧬 Saudi Arabia’s biotech momentum: inside RGMBS 2026: A leader from the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center discusses the Riyadh summit’s SAR5B in agreements and the country’s growing genomics ambitions.

💰 AI, China, and biotech investing with SR One’s Simeon George, M.D: How SR One sizes up biotech investments, the red flags it watches for and how AI and China are reshaping the field.

🫀 Targeting residual inflammation in cardiovascular disease: Rezera’s CEO on the company’s phase 3 NLRP3 inhibitor in peripheral artery disease and a brain-penetrant follow-up for neuroinflammation.

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😷 Medical Science Liaison Manager – Breast, AstraZeneca: Interested in advancing cancer care through scientific engagement? You’ll work with leading oncology experts, healthcare professionals and clinical investigators to identify unmet medical needs, address evidence gaps and support AstraZeneca’s oncology portfolio.

🌍 Director / Senior Director FSP Operational Delivery Lead – EMEA, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Passionate about shaping global clinical research delivery? In this role, you’ll head up strategic FSP accounts across multiple therapeutic areas, oversee portfolio performance and operational transformation, and work with clients and senior leadership.

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🇬🇧 20.10 | Bionow BioIgnite Conference | Daresbury, UK: This life sciences conference combines industry and academia to explore emerging innovations, sector initiatives and funding opportunities, with a focus on collaboration and networking.

🇪🇸 23–27.10 | ESMO Congress 2026 | Madrid, Spain: The international oncology congress brings together clinicians, researchers and experts to share the latest advances in cancer research, treatment and care.

🇳🇱 27–28.10 | World Orphan Drug Congress Europe | Amsterdam, Netherlands: Europe’s largest rare disease and orphan drug meeting features biotech, pharma, policymakers and researchers across cell and gene therapy, diagnostics, market access and real-world evidence.

🤝 09–11.11 | BIO-Europe | Cologne, Germany: Europe’s largest partnering conference for biotech and biopharma, where C-suite leaders, investors and partners meet to strike deals and collaborations.

🧬 10.11 | Genomics and Precision Medicine Congress 2026 | London, UK: A one-day congress from Public Policy Projects, bringing together international experts and national genomics leaders to work out how to move genomics and precision medicine into routine clinical care.

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 fragrant friends,

This week’s news has a certain whiff about it: one of the biggest biotech fund raises in half a decade, global pharma bets big on Chinese RNA tech, biotech’s answer to eau de toilette is taking endangered plants away from the perfume counter, mind-reading technology recreates what people can see from brain scans, and sovereign AI that could hold the key to fast-tracking future cancer treatments.

Don’t lose your scents of direction!

Dodo

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🤑 Forbion raises €2.3bn across two new life sciences venture funds (Investors in Healthcare): Europe’s biggest dedicated life-sciences VC just hit a new milestone. Netherlands-based Forbion has closed its largest raise ever and one of the sector’s biggest globally in five years. The raise lifts its assets under management to roughly €7.5bn, positioning it to back around 30 companies through the Growth Opportunities Fund IV (which targets later-stage biopharma) and Ventures Fund VIII (which backs therapeutics-focused biotechs).

Our take: Forbion is raising its venture and later-stage growth vehicles side by side, a model it has run for years – but now at record scale. This will be particularly impactful in Europe, where biotechs often struggle to fund the costly move into late-stage clinical development. A single manager able to back companies from formation through later rounds reduces the risk of promising assets stalling for lack of follow-on capital.

💊 Novartis wagers almost $8B on a Chinese biotech’s RNA drugs (BioPharma Dive): Novartis has struck a deal worth up to $7.8B for Abogen Biosciences’ mRNA-encoded T-cell engager ABO2203, paying $575M upfront. Unlike conventional engagers manufactured in the lab, ABO2203 instructs patients’ own cells to produce the drug in vivo, aiming to reset the B cells that drive autoimmune disease. Early data from a trial in people with non-Hodgkin lymphoma suggest it is well tolerated, with side effects that resolved over the course of the study.

Our take: Hot on the heels of China’s first-in-class ambitions, this is another sign the country is moving upstream in biotech global dealmaking. ABO2203 may have only preliminary data from an early-stage lymphoma study, but that hasn’t stopped Novartis from putting more than half a billion dollars on the table. With a steady stream of Western pharma deals, it’s clear Chinese biotechs are increasingly valued for genuinely differentiated therapeutic platforms.

🌱 Making scents: could AI help perfumers take pressure off endangered plants? (The Guardian): Biotech is setting its sights on luxury fragrance, this time using AI, molecular analysis and plant cell culture to recreate rare scents without repeatedly harvesting endangered plants. Companies such as Osmo and BioHarvest believe the technology could ease pressure on endangered species while opening up entirely new scents. Conservationists, however, aren’t convinced synthetic alternatives will dent demand for wild ingredients such as oudh, which comes from Aquilaria trees whose wild populations have been devastated.

Our take: Much like diamonds, provenance could become the next battleground in luxury fragrance. If biotech can reproduce the chemistry of rare botanicals without its drawbacks, brands may need to distinguish much more clearly between wild-harvested, cultivated, cell-cultured and AI-designed ingredients. In luxury perfumery, where scarcity and origin are part of the product’s value, regulation and labelling could soon become as important as the science itself.

🤯 ‘Mind-reading’ AI tool can see what you see (The Times): Move over, Derren Brown! Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science have built an AI that can infer what someone is looking at from brain activity alone. Volunteers looked at photos while an fMRI scanner tracked blood flow in their brains; Brain-IT then turned those scans into images closely resembling the originals. Unlike earlier systems, which needed dozens of hours of scans per person, Brain-IT needs only about an hour to read a new person’s brain activity.

Our take: Until now, one of the biggest limitations in brain research has been that models often need to be trained extensively on each individual. Brain-IT has learnt that brain activity patterns are often shared across people, and thus its neural decoding could become transferable. That would spare future systems from starting from scratch with each new person, so one model could serve different patients and clinical settings.

And finally…

🦀 Oxford scientists build powerful ‘home-grown’ machine to accelerate cancer treatments (GB News): Oxford researchers are building an AI-driven system to design personalised cancer vaccines from individual tumour data. Using UK supercomputers (including DAWN and ISAMBARD-AI), the programme aims to identify the best immune targets, manufacture experimental mRNA vaccines, and test whether they trigger a response in patient samples. At the centre is CIARA, an AI scientist platform designed to analyse tumours, coordinate experiments and help generate vaccine candidates.

Our take: Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming part of the national strategy for medicines. Running the programme on home-grown supercomputers suggests the UK increasingly sees computing capacity as strategic health infrastructure, not just a research asset. If drug design comes to depend on large-scale models, the countries that control the compute, the data and the manufacturing may gain a real edge in personalised medicine.

Tune in 🎧

🎓 PhD to industry advice from a biotech recruiter: RHow to tell a better story in interviews, and how to know when a postdoc is actually worth doing.

🔍 How Flagship’s Valo is reshaping AI drug discovery with human data: A former radiation oncologist turned CEO explains what more than 17 million patient records, some spanning 20 years, can reveal about disease.

Apply ✍️

🌍 Director, International Business Analytics, Viridian Therapeutics: Want to help build the international launch strategy for Viridian’s portfolio? You’ll lead market insights, forecasting, competitive intelligence and commercial analytics across priority launch markets, working with global commercial, medical affairs and market access teams to shape launch planning, adoption and lifecycle strategy.

💡 Senior Director, Operational Strategy - Oncology, Ergomed: Interested in shaping how complex oncology studies are won before they even begin? You’ll be responsible for driving forward pre-award strategy and building relationships with key client decision-makers to help secure and grow oncology business.

🧑‍🔬 Director, Medical Engagement Lead, Sarepta Therapeutics: Are you passionate about shaping global medical strategy for neuromuscular disease? You’ll head up Sarepta’s engagement with international KOLs across DMD and related disorders and build long-term scientific partnerships.

RSVP 📆

💻 13.10 | TechBio UK | London, UK: The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, where leaders from biotech, pharma, technology and investment meet to discuss data and AI, genomics and engineering biology.

🎗️ 23–27.10 | ESMO Congress 2026 | Madrid, Spain: The international oncology congress brings together clinicians, researchers and experts to share the latest advances in cancer research, treatment and care.

🤝 09–11.11 | BIO-Europe | Cologne, Germany: Europe’s largest partnering conference for biotech and biopharma, where C-suite leaders, investors and partners meet to strike deals and collaborations.

🧬 10.11 | Genomics and Precision Medicine Congress 2026 | London, UK: A one-day congress from Public Policy Projects, bringing together international experts and national genomics leaders to work out how to move genomics and precision medicine into routine clinical care.

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 wheat frolickers,

This week is a big breakfast bowl of stories: China is going for global dominance in the first-in-class drug race, biotech could hold the key to a cereal-killing crop disease, European pharma leaders are sounding the alarm over the continent’s biotech decline, light-sensitive nanoparticles have triggered light responses in blind mice, and it turns out the man with two brains isn’t just a bad film from the ’80s…

Theresa May, eat your heart out!

Dodo

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

Discover 🔍

🇨🇳 China targets 25% share of global first-in-class drugs in new 5-year plan (Fierce Biotech): The new five-year pharma plan aims to drive more than 20% annual growth in innovative drugs and bring more homegrown candidates into clinical development. The government wants 50 drugmakers to have over 10 billion yuan in annual sales by 2030, and for at least five Chinese medicines to become global blockbusters.

Our take: Aiming for a quarter of the world’s first-in-class drugs is a bold attempt to redefine what China’s pharma industry is known for, primarily generics, active pharmaceutical ingredients, contract services and the efficient execution of Western-led programmes. The plan wants China to become the originator of the science itself, but with overseas licensing deals already worth more than $120B this year, much of its homegrown innovation still ends up in Western pipelines. That will need to change.

🌾 Can this biotech innovation halt the destructive march of a cereal killer? (Phys.org): UK and Japanese researchers have shown how crops can detect and fight off blast fungus. Using crystallography, they mapped tandem kinase proteins, a newer class of plant immune receptors, revealing a “bait” region that traps effectors (small proteins the fungus slips into plant cells to switch off their defences). Building on this, the team engineered a receptor to recognise effectors linked to both wheat and barley infection, a dual specificity rarely seen in nature. (Read the paper)

Our take: Blast fungus is a serious disease in cultivated crops; it destroys enough rice each year to feed 60 million people, and has been spreading through wheat crops since the 1980s. Resistance usually comes from slow conventional breeding, but this work suggests plant immunity could become programmable, with receptors redesigned to recognise new effectors as the fungus evolves. So far it has only been shown in individual wheat cells, but if it works in whole plants, it could mean bespoke resistance for wheat, barley and rice.

🇪🇺 9 pharma leaders sound ‘alarm bells’ on biotech’s decline in Europe (BioPharma Dive): In an open letter, Europe’s pharma leaders are warning that the continent is being squeezed out of the global drug race. Its share of global pharma R&D has fallen from 43% in 1990 to 31% today, while its share of commercial clinical trials has halved to just 9%. Meanwhile, more than $600B in pharma investment has been announced in the US and China in the past two years.

Our take: If this trend continues, Europe risks losing the very foundations of its drug development. Commercial trials, and the investment they bring in, support an entire layer of research infrastructure; once that activity migrates elsewhere, it is incredibly hard to rebuild. The leaders’ asks (faster trials, stronger IP protection, and sensible digital policies) would help, but they skirt the US’s biggest draw: freedom on pricing. Until Europe offers a more lucrative market, the pull across the Atlantic may prove hard to resist.

🐭 Biomimetic nanoparticles trigger light responses in blind mouse retinas (GEN): Researchers have shown that light-sensitive nanoparticles can restore a degree of light responsiveness in degenerated mouse retinas. The hollow particles, made from graphitic carbon nitride, were modelled on chloroplasts and act as miniature photoresponsive interfaces. Injected into the eyes of mice with advanced retinitis pigmentosa, they settled near retinal ganglion cells and produced measurable activity in the visual cortex, along with behavioural responses to light. (Read the paper)

Our take: Most attempts to restore vision focus on repairing genes, replacing cells or implanting electronics. This non-mutation-specific technique takes a different route, instead homing in on the retinal neurons left behind after sight loss. The injected particles act as a wireless interface between incoming light and the surviving nerve cells, reinstating light sensitivity. While the approach does not yet restore vision, the researchers hope this “brings us closer to our long-term goal of developing a new type of retinal prosthesis”.

And finally…

🧠 Brain is two separate organs, scientists find (The Telegraph): In fascinating neural news, Stanford researchers have found that the front and back of the brain may have evolved from two ancient nervous systems that later merged. Studying mouse embryos, they discovered that one set of progenitor cells builds the forebrain and midbrain, while a completely separate set builds the hindbrain – a split they traced as far back as acorn worms. The findings could open up new research avenues into neurodegenerative diseases such as spinal muscular atrophy and ALS, which target hindbrain neurons.

Our take: Developmental biology may need to stop treating the brain as a single lineage. This challenges a basic assumption built into many brain-development models, that one early progenitor gives rise to the whole organ. If the forebrain and hindbrain are developmentally distinct from the outset, disease models, organoids and differentiation protocols may need to be redesigned around separate embryonic origins rather than a single “brain” programme.

Tune in 🎧

☀️ The best biotech conversations you missed this summer: A recap of standout episodes on getting drugs into the brain, avoiding liver uptake, targeting nonsense mutations and circular RNA.

🧬 Finding new opportunities in obesity with Moonwalk Bioscience’s Alex Aravanis, MD, PhD: How the biotech is developing fat-targeted siRNA therapies, using human genetics and AI to pick targets and sharpen drug design.

🍼 How a breast-milk-derived peptide could change bladder cancer care: Hamlet Biopharma’s chair explains how its drug, Alpha1H, is designed to kill bladder tumour cells while sparing healthy tissue.

Apply ✍️

💡 Senior Global Product Manager, Upstream Process Development, Cytiva: Interested in shaping the commercial strategy behind cell line and upstream process development technologies? You’ll own Cytiva’s global portfolio across cell biology solutions, Fast Trak services, and next-generation platforms.

🌍 Sr. Manager, Global Control Tower Ops, Johnson & Johnson MedTech: Passionate about improving global logistics visibility and performance? In this role, you’ll manage the 4PL Control Tower provider, expand adoption across regions and business units, and oversee shipment visibility and exception management.

🔬 Senior Global Study Manager, Central Lab Service, Labcorp: Want to lead complex global studies and act as the main link between clients, CROs and Labcorp teams? You’ll oversee high-complexity study portfolios, manage budgets, risks, milestones and performance metrics, and coordinate cross-functional delivery.

RSVP 📆

🧑‍🔬 29.09 | BioForward 2026 | Oxfordshire, UK: A one-day event connecting R&D-led biotech and life sciences companies with investors, partners and specialist service providers to support collaboration, funding and commercial growth.

👩‍💻 30.09 | Women in Biotech – Edinburgh | Edinburgh, UK: A networking evening and panel on how biotech leaders are using digitalisation and automation to get their businesses AI-ready. Open to all.

💷 01.10 | BioCap 2026 | Macclesfield, UK: Bionow’s one-day investment conference at Alderley Park, bringing together life sciences businesses, researchers and investors to explore funding opportunities and the investment landscape.

💻 13.10 | TechBio UK | London, UK: The BIA’s flagship TechBio conference, where leaders from biotech, pharma, technology and investment meet to discuss data and AI, genomics and engineering biology.

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, you flightless Dodo fans,

Just a short note to let you know that, sadly, Dodo is sick this week, so there is no issue today. Regular programming will resume next week. 🦤

That being said, I daren’t let anyone down, so here’s a podcast for your listening pleasure – enjoy!

Thanks all,

Belle

Hello my trottered tribe,

It’s been a piggin’ week in the world of biotech, with new therapies rooting out childhood brain cancer, porcine kidney transplants keeping patients off dialysis for a record nine months, Google DeepMind snuffling through a human DNA map in search of disease cures, fat jabs helping asthma patients breathe easier, and AI toilets analysing gut health from poo like a pig in muck.

Don’t hog the headlines!

Dodo

If you’d like to sponsor a future edition of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

Biotech’s next frontier

Genomic medicine is at an inflection point. What comes next has even the sceptics feeling hopeful

Learn more

Discover 🔍

👶 BrainChild hauls in $116M to make cell therapies for childhood brain cancers (BioPharma Dive): BrainChild Bio has secured a bumper raise to push its CAR-T therapy for DIPG, an almost always fatal childhood brainstem cancer, into a pivotal Phase 2 trial. The Seattle Children’s Hospital spinout’s B7-H3-targeted treatment is infused directly into the brain’s fluid, skipping chemotherapy conditioning, and can be given in multiple doses. A second, triple-target CAR-T for glioblastoma enters first-in-human trials next year.

Our take: Skipping conditioning does more than spare children a round of chemotherapy; conventional CAR-T is a one-and-done treatment, whereas BrainChild’s therapy can be dosed again through an implanted reservoir. Few companies have tried this at all – the prejudice, as founder Michael Jensen puts it, being that the brain would be intolerant to having cells directly administered. Primary completion isn’t until 2028, so whether that prejudice is justified remains to be seen.

🐷 Pig-to-human kidney transplantation hits a new milestone (Pharmaphorum): A genetically engineered pig kidney has kept a patient dialysis-free for a record 271 days, and he has since received a human donor organ. The eGenesis EGEN-2784 kidney marks the first use of xenotransplantation as a bridge to transplantation. Five patients have now received a pig kidney, two of whom have since gone on to human donor kidneys, while an FDA-cleared 33-patient RESTORE trial will test whether pig kidneys can become a scalable answer to the donor shortage. (Read the Lancet paper)

Our take: Xenotransplantation may become a queue-management technology before it becomes a cure. The most immediate clinical opportunity may not be permanent pig-organ replacement, but using xenotransplants to reshape transplant waiting lists. If pig kidneys can reliably keep patients off dialysis for months, they could buffer the sickest or hardest-to-match patients, changing how scarce human kidneys are allocated and potentially reducing deaths while waiting.

🧠 Google DeepMind maps human DNA in quest to cure ‘all disease’ (The Times): Google DeepMind has built AlphaGenome Atlas, an AI tool predicting the effects of roughly nine billion possible single-letter changes to human DNA. Free for academic researchers, it’s designed to help scientists spot disease-causing mutations hidden among millions of variants. It has already flagged a previously missed mutation as the likely cause of severe epilepsy in a young child, pointing to a faster route from genome sequencing to diagnosis and drug discovery.

Our take: DeepMind is quietly moving upstream in the pharmaceutical value chain. AlphaFold helped researchers understand proteins, which sit close to drug targets, and AlphaGenome Atlas moves even further back, helping decipher which genetic changes are worthy of further research. That gives DeepMind potential influence over the earliest stages of target discovery, patient stratification and disease definition, and makes its AI increasingly embedded in pharma’s drug pipelines.

🫁 Patients with asthma using this weight loss drug ‘may have fewer attacks’ (The Independent): A major UK real-world study into semaglutide, presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress, suggests that metabolic drugs could have unexpected benefits for lung disease. Researchers found that people with asthma taking the drug had nearly 40% fewer attacks, while COPD flare-ups fell by around 20%. The effect was strongest in people with more severe asthma and at higher doses.

Our take: Semaglutide could expose obesity as a hidden driver of “difficult” asthma. The fact that the sickest patients benefit most suggests that some treatment-resistant respiratory disease could actually be due to metabolic inflammation. That could push asthma care towards more deliberate phenotyping of obesity, insulin resistance and systemic inflammation, rather than simply escalating inhaled therapies.

And finally…

💩 Smart toilets are already using AI to analyse your poop (Wired): AI-powered toilet cameras from Kohler Health and Throne are turning one of the most private parts of daily life into a new stream of health data. Their devices clip onto the toilet, recording bowel movements and using AI to analyse stool consistency, colour and urine characteristics, which the companies claim delivers personalised gut-health reports within minutes. Kohler’s device already alerts users to blood in the bowl, while Throne says a next-generation version could pick up blood invisible to the eye within two years – though both stop short of promising a diagnosis.

Our take: A single stool profile tells you very little, but months of individual baseline data could reveal deviations that standard testing would never pick up. Someone managing Crohn’s disease, where clinicians often request stool diaries but patients rarely keep them, could certainly benefit. For the average user, however, $400 (plus an annual subscription) is a lot to pay for something their own eyes could tell them.

Tune in 🎧

🧬 How Evox Therapeutics is targeting CNS diseases with exosomes: The UK biotech's chief executive on why its delivery platform is moving past RNA and biologics into CRISPR-based gene editing.

💰 Funding a virtual biotech without institutional capital with Sarcomatrix’s David Craig: Why the traditional playbook no longer fits a selective funding environment, and how alternative routes such as Regulation D offerings can keep a lean company moving.

🦀 Engineering T-cell engagers for solid cancers: Deck Bio’s chief executive on building multi-target engagers to reach more cancer cells, give tumours fewer ways to escape, and leave healthy tissue alone.

Apply ✍️

💬 Communication Manager, AbbVie: Fancy shaping how one of the world’s biggest pharma companies is seen in the UK? You’ll plan and execute external, corporate, digital and internal campaigns, working across External Affairs, commercial, medical affairs and market access.

🤑 Account Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Ready to drive commercial growth across analytical instruments, consumables and services? In this account-focused role, you’ll sell and support the chromatography and mass spectrometry portfolio, build long-lasting customer relationships and develop strategic growth opportunities.

🤝 Head of Growth & Partnerships, Optima Partners: Passionate about turning specialist data science, AI, bioinformatics and translational research capability into funded client engagements across global life sciences? You’ll co-lead commercial strategy, shape compelling propositions and drive sustainable revenue growth.

RSVP 📆

🔬 21–25.09 | Life Sciences Week 2026 | Birmingham, UK: A five-day national programme bringing together biotech, medtech, pharma, academia and investors around cutting-edge research, AI in biotech/med-tech and the future of UK healthcare innovation.

🧫 29.09 | BioForward 2026 | Didcot, UK: A free event at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus connecting research scientists and R&D companies with the CROs, clinical services, digital and legal providers they depend on.

💷 01.10 | BioCap 2026 | Macclesfield, UK: A one-day conference at Alderley Park on the life sciences funding landscape, with panels on investment trends and an investors’ mixer the evening before.

🤖 13.10 | TechBio UK | London, UK: The BioIndustry Association’s flagship techbio gathering, convening biotech, pharma, tech and investment leaders around data and AI, genomics and engineering biology.

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 early adopters,

This week: ‘superhuman’ AI can spot heart disease from ECG scans, three deaths halt Novartis’s autoimmune CAR-T trials, a congressional task force warns that China’s faster and cheaper trials are pulling research off US soil, Lilly spends $2.9B on a platform that strips out disease-causing antibodies, and UK spin-outs keep leaving because there is nowhere at home to scale up.

Try to keep up!

Dodo

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

Discover 🔍

🤖 ‘Superhuman’ AI tool spots heart disease in less than 2 seconds (The Guardian): Researchers at Imperial College London have built an AI tool that reads routine ECGs in seconds, extracting more detail than the human eye can see to flag heart failure and valve disease. Trained on millions of ECGs, the tool identified up to 81% of heart failure cases and up to 90% of valve disease cases in a 67,000-patient US trial, offering earlier triage ahead of specialist echocardiogram scans.

Our take: ECGs, which record electrical activity in the heart, can spot heart attacks and abnormal rhythms but cannot detect heart disease...until now. Diagnosing it typically involves an echocardiogram, which is expensive, specialist-dependent and often backlogged by months. ECGs, by contrast, are one of the most common tests in medicine. This ‘superhuman’ tech could therefore pick up heart disease alongside routine care at almost no additional outlay, shortening the wait for those already in the queue and finding cases in people who might otherwise be missed.

💀 Novartis halts autoimmune CAR-T trials after 3 deaths, as BMS also pauses studies (Fierce Biotech): Novartis has paused eight trials of its CD19 CAR-T therapy rap-cel in autoimmune and neurological diseases, after three patients died from a severe inflammatory reaction. Bristol Myers Squibb has separately halted enrolment in autoimmune trials of its own CD19 CAR-T, zola-cel, after transient, reversible inflammatory events. Both therapies use rapid manufacturing platforms, and analysts suspect faster production may be driving stronger T-cell expansion – and greater toxicity.

Our take: Severe inflammatory reactions are a recognised, and lethal, hazard of CAR-T. In blood cancer, where patients have usually run out of other options, that has been treated as a price worth paying (the fact that Novartis is continuing its rap-cel cancer trials speaks directly to this). However, autoimmune patients face a different predicament; non-terminal, and often with other treatment options to fall back on, they leave regulators and doctors willing to tolerate far less risk. Finding out what is causing these reactions – the manufacturing, the dose, or the patients themselves – is key to CAR-T ever reaching beyond cancer.

🇨🇳 China poses an increasing security risk as the US biotech innovation edge erodes (BioSpace): According to a congressional task force, China overtook the US in clinical trial numbers six years ago, and has since pulled ahead on R&D funding and translational science. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology warns that this leaves America exposed and dependent on a strategic rival for life-sustaining medicines should relations sour, with faster, cheaper Chinese trials also drawing early-stage research away from US soil.

Our take: Currently, the US is highly dependent on Chinese CDMOs and reagents, making this an infrastructure risk, rather than a scientific one. The BIOSECURE Act’s “companies of concern” rules, law since December 2025, will require federally funded labs and contractors to strip out Chinese equipment and services, but US domestic manufacturing capacity isn’t ready to absorb that shift. Expect stranded programmes and cost spikes long before any fix arrives.

💰 Lilly adds to immune drug pipeline with $2.9B Merida buyout (BioPharma Dive): Eli Lilly is acquiring Merida Biosciences in a multi-billion-dollar deal focused on its precision autoantibody-degradation platform, headlined by MER511, which is currently in Phase 1 for Graves’ disease. Rather than broadly suppressing the immune system, Merida’s biologics tag disease-causing autoantibodies for clearance while preserving healthy immune function. It’s Lilly’s third immunology acquisition of 2026, following buyouts of Ventyx Biosciences and Orna Therapeutics.

Our take: Graves’ disease is turning into a crowded contest for anything that strips pathogenic antibodies from the blood – FcRn blockers, TRAb antagonists, and now Merida’s degrader. But mechanism won’t decide the winner; durability will. Whoever can deliver lasting remission without leaving patients immunocompromised, or relapsing the moment dosing stops, takes the therapeutic and commercial prize. Lilly is betting it gets there first.

And finally…

🔬 UK science breakthroughs are being exploited overseas, minister says (The Times): Science minister Chris McDonald has warned that world-class UK research keeps being commercialised overseas, because university spin-outs can’t find enough growth capital, industrial lab space or scale-up infrastructure at home. He pointed to critical minerals firms built on British research that had to relocate to the US or elsewhere to scale up, and has called for greater private investment and expanded Catapult innovation centres to close the gap.

Our take: The UK’s real weakness may be the middle of its innovation system. Britain has strong universities and generous early-stage research funding, but very little support to carry a discovery from invention to commercialisation. The shortage isn’t simply venture capital; it’s industrial lab space, pilot facilities and translational centres, which matter every bit as much as the money.

Tune in 🎧

🏆 Picking biotech winners beyond the hype cycle with Andera Partners’ Olivier Litzka: A veteran European investor discusses how companies secure funding, keep focus and survive execution risk, plus the push to deepen Europe’s public markets.

🦠 Resetting severe allergies at their cellular source: Allergene AI Therapeutics Founder & CEO on the case for using mRNA and lipid nanoparticles to deliver CAR-T more simply and to far more patients, and what it will take to get there.

💉 The history and science behind GLP1 receptor agonists: From lizard venom to the world’s biggest-selling drugs, a reminder of how far basic research travels.

Apply ✍️

🧑‍🔬 Scientific Affairs Manager, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals: Ready to advance medical and scientific initiatives in rare MC4R pathway diseases? You’ll provide the scientific and medical leadership behind integrated tactical and engagement plans.

✅ Head of Quality, Smart4 Sciences: Interested in leading QA and QC functions, driving site-wide quality strategy in a regulated manufacturing environment? You’ll own the Quality Management System and lead the QA/QC teams, acting as primary MHRA contact and keeping manufacturing, licensing and parallel import operations within EU GMP.

🦀 Clinical Development Physician Medical Director Oncology, Astellas Pharma: Want to oversee the design and delivery of late-phase or multiple early-phase clinical trials in immuno-oncology? You’ll define study strategy, drive execution and lead cross-functional teams as a collaborative consultant.

RSVP 📆

🧪 9.09 | Driving innovation through engineering biology | London, UK: Explore collaboration opportunities, develop project ideas and prepare for anticipated UKRI Engineering Biology Priority Programme calls.

🇨🇭 14-17.09 | Longevity Investors Conference 2026 | Gstaad, Switzerland: An exclusive gathering bringing together investors, family offices, scientists and industry leaders to discuss the latest trends, investment opportunities and insights in longevity and rejuvenation biotechnology.

🇬🇧 21-25.09 | Life Sciences Week 2026 | UK-wide: A week-long series of more than 30 events across the country, opening with a launch conference in Birmingham. Covers everything from early research to AI in biotech and medtech.

🩺 28.09-01.10 | LSI Europe ‘26 | Barcelona, Spain: Now in its fifth year, this summit puts emerging medtech and healthtech founders in front of active investors, with startup pitches alongside keynotes from the CEOs of Stryker, Edwards and Conmed.

🧫 29.09 | BioForward 2026 | Harwell, UK: A one-day exhibition and workshop programme at CO:LABS, connecting early-stage life sciences companies with CROs, CDMOs, IP specialists and lab space providers. Free to attend for the R&D community.

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 sniffling friends,

This week's biotech news has us reaching for the tissues: Lady Gaga launches biotech's answer to eternal youth, the shingles vaccine cuts cardiovascular risk, stroppy teenage hormones could hold the key to tackling asthma, production problems bring deep cuts at Cellares, and a vaccine for the common cold moves a step closer without a Lemsip in sight.

Achoo! (Bless you)

Dodo

If you’d like to sponsor a future edition of Biotech Dodo, send us a message.

The next molecular dream team

The next leap in advanced therapies moves the production of medicines into the cell. What could that mean for patients?

Watch now

Discover 🔍

🧑‍🎤 Inside Outer Bio: Lady Gaga launches skin longevity biotech with $23M (BioXconomy): Legendary pop icon Lady Gaga has revealed her board role at Outer Bio, a biotech co-founded with fiancé Michael Polansky to hunt for new skin-health compounds. Its discovery platform, Yuna, uses surgically discarded skin to keep full-thickness tissue alive and measurable for around four weeks, enabling monitoring of slow processes such as collagen remodelling and chronic inflammation. The company says it can pre-screen roughly 750 million compounds a year, and plans to develop what it finds through pharma and cosmetics partnerships.

Our take: The company’s pitch is that biology, not compute, is now the limiting factor. Yuna’s four-week window is a real advance on testing skin that usually dies within days, but four weeks in a dish is still a long way from a real human face. Starting with skincare ingredients is commercially wise, since they reach the market faster than a drug ever could, but the larger question – whether ex vivo skin predicts what happens in a living patient – waits on a pharma partner to test it properly.

💉 Shingles vaccine linked to lower risk of heart attack and stroke, study finds (The Guardian): A new study suggests GSK’s shingles vaccine Shingrix is linked to a lower risk of heart attack and stroke. Oxford researchers tracked records from 70,000 US adults aged 60 and over, and found that those given Shingrix had a 12% lower risk of a cardiovascular event in the first 3.5 years than those given the older Zostavax vaccine. If confirmed in a randomised trial, the researchers say the benefit could rival daily blood-pressure medication. (Read the Nature Medicine paper)

Our take: The authors’ suggested mechanism is that AS01, an adjuvant present in Shingrix but not in Zostavax, may retrain the immune system to release less IL-6, one of the inflammatory proteins behind heart disease. That would make the heart benefit a property of the adjuvant rather than the vaccine, meaning the rest of GSK’s AS01 portfolio – including its RSV and malaria shots – may have similar cardiovascular benefits. The effect faded after 3.5 years, though, suggesting that immune reprogramming eventually wears off.

♂️ Male sex hormones suppress lung allergies by acting on neurons in mice (GEN): Research in mice helps explain why asthma often eases in boys after puberty, while rates in women climb. Researchers at Peking University found that testosterone boosts sympathetic nerve growth in the lungs, increasing norepinephrine release and dialling down eosinophil-driven inflammation, while blocking androgen receptors reversed the effect and worsened allergic responses. The findings point to a previously overlooked hormone-nerve-immune pathway behind sex differences in asthma. (Read the Science Immunology paper)

Our take: Remission is already more common in adolescence than at any other age, and this study offers a mechanism for it; if puberty is when androgen-driven nerve rewiring kicks in, adolescence may in fact be a window when asthma’s trajectory is unusually malleable. As far as therapies go, inhalers work by calming inflammation once it starts, but these findings point towards remission through nerve growth – a rather more radical approach indeed!

✂️ BMS ends Cellares pact over cell therapy production problems, triggering layoffs (BioSpace): A $380M CAR-T manufacturing bet has unravelled. Bristol Myers Squibb has terminated its Cellares partnership after concluding the automated Cell Shuttle platform could not meet the requirements for commercial Breyanzi production. Cellares disputes that assessment, but the fallout is immediate, with around 100 layoffs planned. The split highlights a challenge in cell therapy: automating manufacturing is hard, but changing an already approved process is even harder.

Our take: Cellares raised $257M only ten months ago on a promise of commercial-scale production by 2027, and its Cell Shuttle carries an FDA designation intended to make post-approval manufacturing changes less painful. That was the very test it just failed, with BMS judging the platform unfit for a product already on the market. Of the roles being laid off, over half are “senior”, including the VP of commercial operations, which suggests Cellares is not just trimming the fat, but reassessing its commercial timeline.

And finally…

🤧 Apollo vaccine triggers broad rhinovirus immunity in Phase 1 (European Biotechnology Magazine): UK biotech Apollo Therapeutics is getting closer to a vaccine for the common cold with the first human data for APL-10456. In Part A of a 144-person Phase 1 trial, a single dose triggered a T-cell immune response that recognised all three major rhinovirus species, which between them span roughly 180 strains. Rather than targeting the variable surfaces antibodies usually latch onto, the vaccine uses a conserved antigen to stimulate broad T-cell immunity.

Our take: COPD is most common, and most damaging, in the over-55s, where exacerbations drive hospital admissions, steroid and antibiotic use, and long-term decline – those are the patients Apollo wants to reach. Part A of the trial ran in healthy adults aged 18 to 54, so it says nothing about whether an older, sicker immune system can mount the same response; Part B, testing exactly that in the over-55s, reports in Q4.

Tune in 🎧

🛡️ The race to weaponise new tech: NATO’s DIANA accelerator is funding startups turning quantum computing and biotech into frontline kit. Sitrep also covers the new Defence University Alliance and NATO’s red lines on Ukraine overspill.

💉 Is the era of cancer vaccines upon us?: Merck and Moderna say their personalised cancer vaccine improved outcomes for melanoma patients. A cancer biologist explains what that means, plus a look at the history of alchemy.

🦟 Malaria drug breakthrough, and space radiation vests: Australian researchers have found a new route to malaria prevention, alongside Britain’s push to eliminate hepatitis C, a vest shielding astronauts from radiation, and aerogel toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

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💡 Brand Manager, Cycle Pharmaceuticals: Ready to turn brand strategy into measurable growth for rare-disease patients? In this role, you’ll lead insight-led marketing for the US speciality Brands portfolio and partner with US sales and medical compliance teams.

💊 Global Head of Patient Safety Operations, Roche: Keen to steer global pharmacovigilance operations that keep patients safe and regulators happy? You’ll build and execute the Patient Safety Operations strategy, lead multi-site teams and vendor relationships.

💰 Strategic Key Account Director, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Got a track record of turning top pharma accounts into growth engines? You’ll own the relationship for Thermo Fisher’s Pharma Services Group, lead group-level governance and commercial processes.

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🧫 1-2.09 | International Bacteriophage Conference (Phages) | Oxford, UK: Bringing together scientists, clinicians and industry experts, the event will explore cutting-edge bacteriophage research and emerging approaches to phage therapy.

🧪 9.09 | Driving innovation through engineering biology | London, UK: This networking event allows participants the chance to explore collaboration opportunities, develop project ideas and prepare for anticipated UKRI Engineering Biology Priority Programme calls.

🧑‍🔬 14-16.09 | MSS2026 | Bled, Slovenia: A three-day scientific meeting focused on purification and advanced analytical technologies for gene therapies, vaccines, plasma, proteins and enzymes, bringing together industry and academia to share biopharma advances.

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 sweet sipping friends,

This week the biotech pot’s been properly brewing: daily sugary drinks are linked to a higher risk of stomach cancer, Hong Kong is building a bridge between US and Asian biotech, Moderna and Merck’s melanoma vaccine shows real promise, Harvard’s lab-grown brains reach their fifth birthday, and a gut bacterial metabolite is tied to faster cognitive decline.

Put the kettle on!

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☕ Sugar-sweetened beverages daily can lead to higher stomach cancer risk (GEN): A decades-long study of more than 112,000 US adults found that drinking at least one sugar-sweetened beverage a day was associated with a 2.45-fold higher risk of gastric cancer, compared with drinking less than one a month. Artificially sweetened drinks showed no such link. The study is observational and cannot prove sugary drinks cause cancer, but it raises fresh questions about whether high fructose intake could play a role in stomach cancer risk. (Read the paper in Gastro Hep Advances)

Our take: If this association with gastric cancer is replicated, it could become a new front in the policy case against sugary drinks. Up until now, taxes and marketing restrictions have largely been framed around obesity and diabetes. Adding cancer prevention could potentially strengthen arguments for higher levies, warning labels and restricted advertising. This old Dodo is switching to the diet stuff, effective immediately!

🇭🇰 With China rising, Hong Kong builds bridge to biotech innovation (BioSpace): LabCentral, a US biotech accelerator, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) to trade scientists and startups between the two ecosystems. The partnership will allow participants to exchange expertise, and build stronger links with American and Asian venture capital and clinical trial networks. (Editor’s note: the memorandum was signed in June at BIO.)

Our take: With increased legislation – including the BIOSECURE Act, which became law last December – US-China collaboration has become even more sensitive, and neutral-ish infrastructure ever more valuable. The bet is that Hong Kong evolves into a place where partnerships are restructured, due diligence is conducted, IP is licensed, and capital is deployed with sufficient separation to reduce geopolitical exposure.

💉 Vaccine breakthrough stops cancer returning in trial (BBC News): A personalised mRNA vaccine from Moderna and Merck has shown promising results in preventing high-risk melanoma from returning after surgery. In the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial involving 1,137 patients, intismeran was administered alongside Merck’s existing immunotherapy, Keytruda. Topline results show the combination significantly extended the time patients remained cancer-free and reduced the risk of the disease spreading to other organs, compared with Keytruda alone, with fuller findings due at a medical conference in October.

Our take: Precision oncology has largely meant matching patients to existing therapies using biomarkers. Intismeran pushes that logic much further, with the tumour itself becoming the blueprint for producing an individual treatment encoding up to 34 neoantigens. If scalable, that changes the economics and structure of oncology; the question stops being which patients qualify for a drug and starts being how quickly you can develop one.

🧠 A ‘renaissance for biomedicine’: human brain organoids model development for 5 years (Fierce Biotech): Harvard researchers have kept lab-grown brain organoids alive for five years (with some cultures continuing even longer) – far beyond the months most models survive. Grown from a donor’s blood sample, the cells were found to age on a human schedule, with gene-expression and epigenetic changes running from early foetal patterns to features that appear only after birth. Scientists say the models could help in the study of autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions. (Read the paper in Nature)

Our take: The five-year brain culture is a scientific breakthrough, but it is also a commercial problem. Longitudinal experiments demand years of investment in cell culture, specialist staff and quality control before producing anything usable, which could disproportionately favour well-resourced universities and large pharmaceutical companies. The Harvard team wants this pipeline picked up by biotechs and startups, but they are precisely the organisations least able to fund half a decade of incubator space and technicians before seeing a result.

And finally…

🦠 There’s a new link between gut health and Alzheimer’s disease (Wired): Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have linked a gut bacterial metabolite called imidazole propionate (ImP) to Alzheimer’s disease. In a study of 1,196 cognitively healthy adults, higher blood levels of ImP were associated with faster cognitive decline and higher levels of the Alzheimer’s biomarkers pTau-217 and NfL. In mice, ImP increased blood-brain barrier permeability and worsened disease-like brain changes. (Read the paper in Nature Communications)

Our take: ImP has to cross the blood-brain barrier to reach neurons (damaging it further in the process), which means the barrier fails before the brain does. That raises the possibility that microbial metabolites change the brain’s permeability in ways that make it more vulnerable to multiple inflammatory or metabolic insults. The wider therapeutic opportunity could therefore be preserving the barrier’s integrity, not targeting any one gut-derived molecule.

Tune in 🎧

🦀 How Cancer Research Horizons is building the future of childhood cancer medicines: This episode looks at why children are still largely reliant on repurposed adult drugs, and how the C-Further consortium plans to build a dedicated pipeline of first-in-class paediatric oncology therapeutics.

🧬 Getting to a first product approval with Celcuity’s Brian Sullivan: A discussion on why targeting an “untreated disease mechanism” can outperform chasing single mutations, and how Celcuity licensed and de-risked a dormant asset.

🧠 Targeting the brain’s immune system in Alzheimer’s disease: Evinco Therapeutics’ CEO discusses natural killer cell-derived particles, which are designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and deliver proteins and microRNAs directly to the brain.

Apply ✍️

🎩 Associate Director, Device Lead, GSK: Passionate about medical device technology, manufacturing science and combination products? This global role will own GSK’s device platform, leading supplier technical management, supply strategy, technology transfer, lifecycle management and manufacturing efficiency.

🏗️ Capital Project Manager, FUJIFILM Biotechnologies: Know your way around delivering complex site-based capital projects? This role involves end-to-end ownership of multiple projects, managing scope, budgets, schedules, and quality and safety KPIs.

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🧫 1-2.09 | International Bacteriophage Conference (Phages) | Oxford, UK: Bringing together scientists, clinicians and industry experts, the event will explore cutting-edge bacteriophage research and emerging approaches to phage therapy.

🧪 9.09 | Driving innovation through engineering biology | London, UK: This networking event allows participants the chance to explore collaboration opportunities, develop project ideas and prepare for anticipated UKRI Engineering Biology Priority Programme calls.

🧑‍🔬 14-16.09 | MSS 2026 | Bled, Slovenia: A three-day scientific meeting focused on purification and advanced analytical technologies for gene therapies, vaccines, plasma, proteins and enzymes, bringing together industry and academia to share biopharma advances.

🇬🇧 21-25.09 | Life Sciences Week 2026 | Birmingham, UK: A national programme of more than 30 conferences, roundtables and showcases, opening with a launch day conference at Millennium Point on 21 September.

💰 28.09-1.10 | LSI Europe '26 | Barcelona, Spain: The emerging medtech summit brings startups together with investors and strategics, with around 200 presenting companies pitching to the funds and corporates that show up to write cheques. Applications to present close on 28 August.

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 master builders,

This week: Cambridge scientists are growing miniature human organs from NHS patients’ own cells, AI has drawn up a 766-gene blueprint for schizophrenia risk, CytoDyn’s leronlimab helps clear HIV from infant macaques, Tenax’s oral levosimendan comes apart in phase 3, and Stanford researchers assemble 16 working viruses from scratch to take on drug-resistant bacteria.

Mind how you go with those blueprints!

Dodo

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Treat yourself: biotech edition

The next leap in advanced therapies moves the production of medicines into the cell. What could that mean for patients?

Find out now

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🐭 ‘A mouse can’t tell us what works’: UK scientists to grow miniature human organs for drug testing (The Guardian): A new £20m Cambridge-led project will grow human organoids (tiny clumps of tissue) from NHS patients’ cells to make drug testing more accurate, personalised and less reliant on animals. The models will mimic diseases – including Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, cancer and neurological conditions – to help researchers test whether a candidate works in all patients or only a subset. The project aims to create a standardised library of validated models for academics and industry.

Our take: More than 90% of drugs that clear animal testing still fail in human trials, so the case for organoids is not only about using fewer animals; it is that the current system tests the wrong species. Patient-derived organoids are valuable precisely because they capture biological differences between individuals, so the challenge is to standardise how they are grown and tested without flattening the genetic, cellular and disease variation researchers are trying to study.

🧠 AI is helping solve the intricate genetic puzzle of schizophrenia (Wired): Scientists have identified 766 genes linked to schizophrenia, including 641 not previously highlighted in transcriptome-wide studies, using AI-based computational models which capture long-range regulatory relationships. The Nature Genetics study drew on genetic data from over 102,000 people and brain tissue from six regions, suggesting schizophrenia risk builds through coordinated gene networks rather than single faulty genes. The findings could help explain why symptoms vary so widely between patients. (Editor’s note: the Nature Genetics paper was published in June.)

Our take: The clinical value of maps like this will depend on how representative the underlying data is. Psychiatric genomics has historically overrepresented people of European ancestry, and the co-expression networks that make this method work are themselves learned from brain tissue donors who skew the same way. Polygenic findings already transfer less accurately to other populations and without broader ancestry and environmental representation, the technology could deepen, rather than reduce, health inequalities in risk prediction and treatment selection.

🐵 CytoDyn’s leronlimab reaffirms HIV potential after combo treatment eradicates virus in infant macaques (Fierce Biotech): CytoDyn’s leronlimab has helped eradicate HIV in infant macaques, treated within 72 hours of infection, when combined with antiretroviral therapy and two broadly neutralising antibodies. All eight animals on the triple regimen showed no viral rebound for up to a year after treatment stopped, while individual therapies and simpler combinations failed to prevent the virus from establishing itself. Leronlimab blocks CCR5, the co-receptor HIV uses to enter immune cells, while the other therapies attack the virus directly.

Our take: Given that every combination without leronlimab failed, the macaque results make a strong case that CCR5 blockade is doing something the other drugs cannot. What they cannot yet show is how far the 72-hour treatment window stretches, or whether it exists at all in adults. Future trials will need to establish that while still protecting participants from being assigned an inferior regimen, which creates a difficult trial-design and regulatory problem for HIV-cure research.

🫀 Tenax trounced by phase 3 heart failure readout (pharmaphorum): Tenax Therapeutics’ shares fell more than 85% this week, after its phase 3 LEVEL trial missed both its primary and key secondary endpoints. TNX-103, an oral version of the calcium sensitiser levosimendan, failed to improve how far patients could walk, or their symptom scores, compared with placebo. The target was pulmonary hypertension caused by a stiff heart, a condition with no approved treatment – Tenax’s bet was that an oral levosimendan, long used intravenously in Europe but never approved in the US, could fill that gap.

Our take: Levosimendan works by helping the heart squeeze harder, but in this condition the squeeze was never the problem; the heart pumps fine, it just won’t relax enough to fill properly between beats. Tenax says the trial enrolled too many patients with mild disease, and it wants regulators to let it revise its approach. However, the more likely explanation is that a contraction drug was never going to fix a stiffness problem, whatever state the patients arrived in.

And finally…

🦠 Sixteen AI-designed viruses offer a new route against drug-resistant bacteria (phys.org): Stanford-led researchers have crossed a significant threshold in generative biology, using AI to design complete viral genomes that can function in living cells. Of 285 synthesised candidates, 16 produced viable viruses capable of infecting and killing E. coli; a cocktail of these synthetic phages went further, killing bacterial strains that had already evolved resistance to the natural virus they were modelled on. The work points towards custom-designed viruses as a new weapon against drug-resistant bacteria. (Read the Science paper)

Our take: A major advantage of AI-designed phages could be their ability to respond as bacteria evolve resistance. That creates an unusual, but important, regulatory problem: conventional drug approvals assume a relatively fixed therapeutic product, while an effective phage platform might need to repeatedly update its viral components. Regulators may eventually need a framework closer to platform or strain-update approvals than a traditional drug-by-drug assessment.

Tune in 🎧

🇨🇳 Why Western pharma is sleeping on China’s circular RNA revolution: Therorna’s founder makes the case for circular RNA over linear mRNA, arguing it offers greater stability, durability and the ability to be re-dosed.

🤖 AI-Designed Viruses, OpenAI’s First Device, The Mansion Section: TBPN covers the synthetic phage paper, a forthcoming OpenAI hardware device, and Meta’s child safety case, with guests from Khosla Ventures, Databricks and the live-shopping platform Whatnot.

🧬 Cell therapy advances and biotech leadership with Nkarta’s Paul Hastings: Nkarta’s CEO on an off-the-shelf CAR NK approach to autoimmune disease, and why US clinical trial infrastructure is holding cell therapy back.

Apply ✍️

🎩 Head of Life Sciences, London & Partners: Experienced in strategy, investment and cluster development? This leadership role will involve shaping London’s life sciences growth strategy and building relationships across industry, government, healthcare and research.

⚙️ Senior Project Engineer, Cytiva: Got a track record of delivering manufacturing projects on time and under budget? You’ll lead cross-functional teams, drive continuous improvement initiatives, and validate new equipment running to Medical QMS standards.

🫡 Senior Director, Market Strategy and Development, Thermo Fisher Scientific: Interested in commercial strategy, demand generation and biopharma markets? This senior leadership role will set global go-to-market direction across Thermo Fisher’s CDMO portfolio.

📊 Senior Manager, RWE/Epidemiology, Pfizer: Got a knack for wringing insights from real-world data? You’ll design epidemiological studies across Pfizer’s internal medicine pipeline, author regulatory submissions, and build external data partnerships.

RSVP 📆

🧬 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.

🤝 01-02.09 | Asia Bio Partnering Forum | Singapore: Asia-Pacific’s flagship dealmaking gathering, now in its fourth year, bringing 650+ pharma, biotech and investor attendees to Marina Bay Sands for 2,500 one-to-one meetings and 300+ licensing 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 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!

Dodo

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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.

Tune in 🎧

🧠 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.

RSVP 📆

🧑‍🔬 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,

Dodo

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A platform for personalised medicine

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

View analysis

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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.

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🧑‍🔬 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.

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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.

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🧑‍🔬 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.

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🧬 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.

Apply ✍️

💰 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.

RSVP 📆

💡 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,

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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.

Discover 🔍

📈 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.

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🧬 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.

Discover 🔍

🌿 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.

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🎬 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.