Novartis is using an AI “digital twin” to simulate the clinicians, statisticians, and ops teams who plan a clinical trial.
The planning discussions that took ~6 months now run in hours, based on Chinmay Bhatt’s talk at @GalienFdn Forum in London today.
Tufts puts a day of drug-development delay at $500k–$800k. Six months saved = up to $150M saving per trial.
The bottleneck at @Novartis wasn’t the science. It was the meeting — and that’s the layer AI is eating first.
AstraZeneca signed a deal worth up to $18.5B for a Chinese obesity drug it hasn't finished testing.
@AstraZeneca didn't buy the company — just the licence. Exclusive rights outside China to CSPC's weight-loss drugs.
Why pay so much, so early, without owning it? Because a licence is cheaper than a takeover.
Chinese drug licensing hit a record $137.7B in 2025, up from $13.9B in 2021. The patent cliff is sending Big Pharma shopping in China.
The weight-loss giant just bet $4B on vaccines.
@EliLillyandCo announced 3 deals on May 26: Curevo, Vaccine Co, LimmaTech.
Looks scattered. It isn't.
There's a big strategic play. A growing body of evidence links shingles vaccination to lower dementia risk, and Epstein-Barr infection to multiple sclerosis. Lilly's own framing: prevent the disease "at its source, rather than treat its consequences."
💊 That's the bet. Not selling vaccines against separate bugs — owning the upstream trigger of chronic disease decades before it appears.
Sepsis kills more people than breast, prostate and bowel cancer combined.
The standard diagnostic? A test from the 1960s that takes 2–3 days, while mortality rises ~8% every hour you wait.
This is what we're working on at HQ Science: whole-transcriptome long-read sequencing that reads the host response and pathogen signal together, in hours instead of days.
Last week, our clinical partners at Oslo University Hospital joined us in Harwell to review the first results from our 1,000-patient study — the evidence base for UK and EU approval.
WHOOP built a strap that reads your body. Now it's reading your blood.
Both @WHOOP and @ouraring run clinical bloodwork now — similar panels, same lab (@QuestDX). When everyone has the data, the data isn't the moat. It's infrastructure, like step counts before it.
What's left to own is the layer no sensor can reach. Your ring sees your HRV drop overnight. It can't see the argument, the airport food, the four days without sunlight.
Passive signals tell you what happened, but context tells you why.
My bet: the platform that wins by 2028 won't have the deepest panel. It'll capture that context with zero effort from you.
@RishiSunak@PCR_News Amazing initiative! You can also have a look into PSMA imaging technology that speeds up the diagnostic of prostate cancer and it was approved by MHRA
A pancreatic cancer pill sent a $19B biotech to $26B in 4 hours.
@RevMedicines' Phase 3 drug nearly doubled survival vs chemo and cut death risk 60%, as was shown at @ASCO. @Merck walked away from buying them at ~$30B in January — probably the most expensive "no" of the year.
Speaking Tuesday at Digital Health World Congress in London 🇬🇧
My talk: AI in biotech is hitting a wall — and the model isn't the bottleneck. The biology underneath it is.
Come find me if you're building in this space.
@elonmusk, while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand.