#106 - Teenage memories and zombie cells
The coffee break biotech roundup, by SomX.
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.
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💰 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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🧑🔬 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.
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