Bayer and Iambic collaborate on AI-driven small molecule drug discovery

Therna Biosciences appointed Kevin Green, former Chief Business Officer of Inceptive, as Chief Operating Officer and added two AI technical leaders to its advisory team, while the NIH Common Fund selected the company as a Phase I winner of its Targeting RNA in Disease with Novel Technologies Challenge. Green, who joined Therna in August and brings more than 20 years of experience across AI-enabled drug discovery and RNA therapeutics, leads the company's operations and business development as its RNA-Logix platform moves into partnered and internal programs. The new AI advisors are Dr. Dave Burke, the first Chief Technology Officer of Arc Institute and previously Vice President of Engineering for Android at Google, and Mr. Harsh Mehta, co-founder and CTO of Mirendil and previously a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic and a researcher at Google. Therna is one of 25 Phase I winners of the three-phase TRDNT Challenge, which offers up to $13.1 million in total awards as teams develop and validate their technologies through 2027. Therna's winning proposal introduces a co-scientist agent built on RNA-Logix that designs and optimizes sequence-specific activating antisense oligonucleotides for ultra-rare haploinsufficiencies.

insitro announced that the advanced machine learning models it built with Eli Lilly and Company to predict in vitro and in vivo properties of small molecules are now available to certain biotech companies through Lilly TuneLab. The models were trained on multi-species preclinical data that Lilly generated over decades of research from hundreds of thousands of unique molecules, offering an alternative to the industry standard method of extrapolation from in vitro assays. The collaboration, announced in September 2025, paired insitro's computational and AI/ML expertise with Lilly's proprietary preclinical dataset of in vitro and in vivo measurements across compounds with established ADMET properties. The in vivo PK models are a critical component of insitro's TherML platform for small molecule discovery, alongside machine learning and physics-based in silico screening, affinity models powered by proprietary adaptive DNA-encoded libraries generating data up to 1B compound scale, and an active-learning medicinal chemistry design engine. Lilly TuneLab is part of Lilly Catalyze360, alongside Lilly Ventures, Lilly Gateway Labs, and Lilly ExploR&D, and is built on a federated learning infrastructure hosted by a third-party provider.

Profluent announced a collaboration with BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. to design and optimize novel enzyme therapies for BioMarin's pipeline. Under the agreement, Profluent will apply its foundational AI models to generate novel potential drug candidates, and BioMarin will screen the results with the goal of eventually advancing the most promising designs. Profluent will design and optimize enzyme candidates using its suite of proprietary protein language models, which draw on the Profluent Protein Atlas, described as the largest protein sequence dataset in the world with more than 115 billion unique sequences. BioMarin will use Profluent's AI models to rapidly explore protein designs and identify candidates with desired activity and stability profiles, then advance the most promising into preclinical testing. Pooja Agarwal, Vice President and Head of Metabolic Conditions Research at BioMarin, said the collaboration pairs Profluent's de novo protein design approach with BioMarin's decades of enzyme therapy expertise, while Profluent CEO Ali Madani said the partnership aims to accelerate BioMarin's drug discovery pipeline.

Ginkgo Datapoints, an offering of Ginkgo Bioworks, and Apheris GmbH announced that the Antibody Developability Consortium has launched with AbbVie, argenx, Lundbeck, and Takeda as founding members. The industry collaboration aims to build the field's largest standardized antibody developability dataset, with each founding member contributing proprietary antibody sequences and Ginkgo Datapoints filling any remaining capacity from publicly available sources to reach 10,000 antibodies in total. Using Apheris' federated infrastructure, members can train, benchmark, and refine AI models on the full consortium dataset without exposing their raw proprietary sequences to other members, and they retain ownership of the sequences and assay data they contribute. Ginkgo Datapoints leads the scientific design and execution, including sequence selection, antibody production, and high-throughput wet-lab characterization, and trains a foundation antibody developability model within Apheris' secure environment. Charlotte Deane of the University of Oxford and Peter Tessier of the University of Michigan will provide independent scientific oversight, and the consortium's initial dataset is targeted for delivery to members by early 2027.

The commercialization of AI-driven drug development continues to move forward. Insilico Medicine announced a partnership to build a generative biology foundation model focused on biologic design and target optimization. The 2026 European Society for Medical Oncology annual meeting will open from October 23 to 27, featuring 28 breakthrough clinical studies led by or deeply involving China, of which 4 were selected for oral presentation in the plenary session, accounting for one-third of the total. In the pharmaceutical segment, 29 late-breaking abstract trial drugs were originally developed or co-developed by domestic Chinese pharmaceutical companies, covering multiple frontier areas including antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, and EGFR-TKI-resistant non-small cell lung cancer. Guosheng Securities noted that the radiopharmaceutical sector recently saw two major deals: Telix acquired ITM for 1.65 billion US dollars, and Borui Chuanghe signed a collaboration with Novartis worth up to 900 million US dollars. Meanwhile, Ionis' oligonucleotide therapy Ulefnersen met its primary endpoint in a Phase III study for FUS-ALS, providing the first effective treatment option for this rare disease. As of August 31, 2026, the top ten weighted stocks in the SSE STAR Market Biomedical Index accounted for 51.54% of the total, namely United Imaging Healthcare, BeiGene, Allist Pharmaceuticals, Baili Tianheng, Zelgen Biopharmaceuticals, RemeGen, iRay Technology, Huitai Medical, Junshi Biosciences, and MGI Tech.