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.
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💻 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.
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