Biotech archive
Every Biotech story, newest first. 88 in this archive.
Jul 28, 2026
The Concept Bottleneck: COMPASS Maps Tumor Immune Biology Before It Predicts Who Responds to Checkpoint Inhibitors
COMPASS, a pan-cancer foundation model in Nature Medicine, predicts immunotherapy response through 44 interpretable immune concepts — beating 22 baselines by 8.5% accuracy on average across 16 clinical cohorts.
Jul 28, 2026
The Physics Gate: DrugRPG Tests Whether Physical Laws Can Filter AI Drug-Design Hallucinations
DrugRPG, published in Communications Chemistry on July 18, 2026, combines chemical foundation-model priors with Lennard-Jones-inspired physics guidance to cut severe steric clashes 65.4% and raise multi-objective developability success 28.6% in structure-based drug design.
Jul 27, 2026
The Closed Loop: Why AI Drug Discovery Lives or Dies on Lab Integration, Not Model Size
Cytiva’s Paul Belcher told MIT Technology Review that AI drug discovery succeeds only when autonomous labs feed prediction and validation back into models — and when negative data stops staying in notebooks.
Jul 27, 2026
The Open Gate: OpenDDE Brings IsoDDE-Class Co-Folding to Apache-Licensed Drug Discovery
Aureka AI Research's OpenDDE release puts IsoDDE-level antibody–antigen co-folding behind an Apache 2.0 license — with checkpoints, code, and scaling-law evidence that the field is entering an LLM-style compute regime.
Jul 27, 2026
The Closed Loop: NISE Teaches Two Neural Networks to Negotiate Until a Drug Has a Pocket
A Nature paper from the University of Washington's Polizzi lab introduces NISE — an iterative loop pairing LASErMPNN with structure predictors that designed picomolar drug binders for exatecan and apixaban with experimental hit rates up to 100%, without physics-based energy functions.
Jul 26, 2026
The Blueprint Layer: UCSF Team Programs Protein Shape the Way Engineers Draw Parts
A UCSF preprint integrates CAD shape blueprints with RFdiffusion, structurally validating 31 of 59 designs and coupling a helical propeller to an F₁-ATPase rotor for an ATP-responsive molecular swimmer prototype.
Jul 26, 2026
The Ensemble Turn: Experiment-Guided AlphaFold3 Rewrites What Structure Prediction Owes the Lab
A Nature Biotechnology study shows AlphaFold3 can be steered by NMR, X-ray, and cryo-EM data to produce measurement-consistent protein ensembles—often in minutes on a GPU, with fewer restraint violations than deposited PDB structures.
Jul 26, 2026
Stability First: ProteinMPNN Redesigns Are Rewriting the Starting Line for Enzyme Evolution
A Nature study from David Liu's Broad Institute lab shows that AI-redesigned botulinum proteases, built with ProteinMPNN, make better starting points for phage-assisted continuous evolution—yielding enzymes with up to 79-fold greater specificity for the neurodegeneration target ataxin-2.