#85 - Pride, peptides, & pioneering pregnancies
The coffee break biotech roundup, by SomX.
Hello, my fellow forward thinkers,
This week, pride and progress share the stage. Nominations open for Endpoints’ LGBTQ+ leaders in biopharma, AI tools edge closer to everyday bench science, Dupixent collects yet another inflammatory indication, camel-derived peptides take a swing at antibiotic resistance, and in Oxford, a transplanted womb delivers a baby and a quiet redefinition of what transplantation can be.
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🌈 Who’s leading LGBTQ+ inclusion in biopharma? Nominate them for Endpoints’ annual report (Endpoints): Nominations are open for the fifth edition of the LGBTQ+ Leaders in Biopharma report, which profiles around a dozen scientists, executives, investors and other figures each year. The 2026 edition arrives at an important moment, as anti-LGBTQ bills in the US continue to climb, federal health research has been scaled back, and several large companies have retreated from DEI commitments. Nominations close 25 March, with the report due in June.
Our take: With major companies pulling back from DEI surveys, agreeing to be publicly profiled carries more weight than it did in 2022, making reports like this one all the more worthwhile. Biopharma benefits from people who think differently and live differently, and young people considering science careers jolly well deserve to see that reflected. Endpoints has built the closest thing the sector has to a longitudinal record of LGBTQ+ leadership.
👩🏻💻 Tamarind Bio secures $13.6M Series A to make AI more accessible for biology (GEN):The Stanford-founded company offers a library of 200+ AI models covering antibodies, peptides, small molecules and more – removing the need for bench scientists to code or wrangle cloud infrastructure. Around 100 biotech companies now use the platform, including eight of the top 20 pharma players, which caught the eye of Dimension Capital, who led the round. Apparently, wet lab biologists were forever emailing computational colleagues to run AlphaFold jobs on their behalf; Tamarind made that email unnecessary.
Our take: AlphaFold won a Nobel Prize, but most bench biologists still couldn’t use it without emailing a colleague. That gap between model capability and practical usability has been wildly underestimated. The industry spent years optimising model performance while the actual bottleneck – getting non-computational scientists to run them independently – went largely unaddressed. Tamarind is essentially selling smart access to something that already exists.
🤧 FDA approves Dupixent as first treatment for AFRS (The Pharmaletter): The approval covers adults and children aged six and older with a history of sinus surgery for allergic fungal rhinosinusitis (AFRS), a chronic condition driven by allergic hypersensitivity to fungi. Developed by Regeneron and licensed to Sanofi, Dupixent generated a rather handsome $18.5 billion in sales last year and is now approved across nine distinct type 2 inflammatory diseases in the US. One does get around.
Our take: Nine indications and counting. Each approval cements Dupixent as the default type 2 inflammation drug, a position that competitors will find very difficult to displace. Worth noting, though, that the surgery prerequisite may exclude patients who would benefit, simply because they haven’t had the chance to fail surgery first.
🐫 Camel antimicrobials could get us over the hump of antibiotic resistance (BioTechniques): Researchers at Sultan Qaboos University have identified three antimicrobial peptides from dromedary camels, two of which showed jolly impressive activity against multidrug-resistant bacteria including MRSA and E. coli. The peptides kill bacteria by damaging cell membranes, rather than through site-specific binding which conventional antibiotics relies on. Both showed low toxicity at therapeutic concentrations. Terribly well-mannered, as far as antimicrobials go.
Our take: Camels already gave us nanobodies, the single-domain antibodies now used across diagnostics and therapeutics. These new antimicrobial peptides suggest camel immunology has rather more to offer. Their immune systems evolved under frightfully harsh conditions: desert heat, scarce water, relentless pathogen load. That sort of evolutionary pressure tends to produce defence molecules that temperate-climate lab animals simply never needed to develop. One does wonder what else is in there.
And finally…
🍼 ‘Miracle’ baby born to first UK womb transplant from dead donor (BBC News): Grace Bell, born without a functioning womb due to MRKH syndrome, has given birth to a rather splendid baby boy at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford. Hugo, now 10 weeks old, is the first UK baby born through deceased donor uterine transplantation. The transplant is the third of ten in a UK clinical trial, but the first baby born. More than 100 womb transplants have been performed worldwide, resulting in over 70 healthy births.
Our take: Unlike most transplants, the womb is removed after one or two pregnancies to spare lifelong immunosuppression. A temporary organ with a planned exit point is a rather novel concept in transplantation and it changes the risk-benefit arithmetic considerably, particularly for conditions where quality of life is the goal. MRKH affects 1 in 5,000 women, and until very recently, transplantation simply wasn’t on the table.
Tune in 🎧
🤖 Did AI researchers let AI hallucinations into scientific papers?: A top AI conference accepted papers with 100 fabricated citations. GPTZero’s Alex Cui explains how it happened, and what it reveals about researchers’ AI habits.
🦟 Titans of Science: Jane Carlton: She stole her brother’s genetics textbook at 8, then went on to sequence the malaria parasite genome. Jane now directs Johns Hopkins’ Malaria Research Institute.
🌧️ The world is running out of water; Why some people get stuck in grief; Is our black hole a clump of dark matter?: Can artificially seeding clouds solve global water shortages? Is prolonged grief a real brain condition? And is Sagittarius A* actually dark matter? A busy week for science.
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🧭 Technical Programme Manager, Latent Labs: Thrive where code meets pipettes? This hire will orchestrate ML research, wet lab teams, and partners, bringing structure to ambitious programmes and keeping bold, science-heavy projects moving from plan to impact.
🫀 SVP Head of Cardio-Renal Research, Evotec: Ready to steer a therapeutic empire? You’ll set cardio-renal R&D strategy, back high-value targets, manage budget and partnerships, and guide programmes from discovery through preclinical build-out.
📊 Laboratory Manager, Imperial College London: Fancy running a start-up playground for deep science? You’ll keep shared labs humming, manage safety and kit from gas lines to LN2, support founders, and become the go-to on-site lab fixer.
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🦾 05.03 | Women in Biotech - BIA | Cambridge, UK: Celebrate International Women’s Day with a full day of thought-leading panels and discussions, inspirational talks as well as exciting keynote speakers.
🍺 11.03 | Biotech & Beers | Newcastle, UK: Join Bionow for an networking evening which provides opportunities for people from companies working in or with the life sciences sector to network and socialise with their peers in an informal setting.
📑 29.04 | The Hardian Health Tech Summit | London, UK: The Hardian team will be joined by representatives from the MHRA, FDA, NICE, NHS leaders, and more across the healthtech world for real-world insight into regulation and market access in medical devices.
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