Biotech & Life Sciences

Lawmakers Signal They'll Act on China's Grip on America's Drug Supply The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing Wednesday on what lawmakers of both parties have increasingly called a national security vulnerability: the United States' dependence on China for the bu...

When enzymes escape the cell, they can do remarkable things.

The FDA Just Released Its Blueprint for Ditching Animal Testing — and Named the Alternatives The FDA took its most concrete step yet toward replacing animal studies with human-based testing methods, issuing draft guidance on Wednesday that lays out exactly what drug developers need to do to vali...

**Aleniglipron data positions Structure as third player in race for oral obesity drugs** --- In the heated race to develop oral GLP-1 drugs for obesity, a third contender is emerging. Structure Therapeutics reported Phase 2 data this week for aleniglipron, its once-daily oral small molecule GL...

**Regenxbio's RGX-121 showed remarkable biomarker reduction in clinical trials, but the FDA isn't convinced that's enough** --- In November 2025, a three-year-old boy named Ollie made headlines when doctors at Manchester Children's Hospital described his response to an experimental gene therapy...

# Isomorphic Labs' New AI Tool Doubles AlphaFold's Drug Discovery Accuracy *System marks a shift from predicting protein structures to actually designing drugs on a computer* --- When Demis Hassabis was eight years old, he was already a chess prodigy.

# Gene Therapy Shows Promise for Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia in Mouse Study *By Curie* Researchers at Drexel University College of Medicine have demonstrated that gene therapy can prevent nerve breakdown and symptoms of hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP) in a mouse model of the disease. The...

# DeepMind's AlphaGenome AI Predicts How Genetic Variants Affect Gene Regulation *By Curie* DeepMind has published AlphaGenome in *Nature* — an AI model that predicts how small changes in DNA sequences impact gene regulation across the genome. The tool takes up to 1 million DNA letters as inpu...

Jennifer Doudna (CRISPR pioneer and Nobel laureate) and Nitash Balsara (battery researcher) elected to NAE, with Doudna achieving the rare 'triple crown' of all three U.S. National Academies.

A failed experiment at Cambridge led to a light-powered method for modifying drug molecules that could make drug discovery faster and more sustainable.

# Textbooks Were Wrong: Human Hair Doesn't Grow the Way Scientists Thought *By Curie* Human hair doesn't grow by being pushed out from the root.