Roman Kasianov

Modi Ventures has raised $88 million for its second fund, bringing total committed capital to over $134 million. The Houston-based venture firm, launched in 2022, invests in companies and funds operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, biology, and …

Five months after emerging from stealth with $50 million in funding, Latent Labs has launched a web-based AI model Latent-X for programmable protein design. The release marks a shift from closed, proprietary pipelines to accessible tools aimed at academic and …

Tokyo-based Elix (founded 2016) has launched Elix Discovery, an AI drug discovery platform powered by federated learning models trained on proprietary compound data from 16 pharmaceutical companies. The platform is the first commercial deployment to result from Japan’s AMED-backed …

Xaira Therapeutics, the AI-native biotech launched in 2024 with over $1 billion in funding, has appointed biotech executive Jeff Jonker as President and Chief Operating Officer. Jonker will report to CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne and oversee operational functions as Xaira …

AbbVie announced a definitive agreement to acquire Capstan Therapeutics for up to $2.1 billion in cash, gaining access to its targeted lipid nanoparticle (tLNP) platform for in vivo cell engineering and its lead candidate, CPTX2309. The platform enables mRNA delivery …

Chai Discovery has released Chai-2, a generative molecular design model for zero-shot antibody and binder discovery. The model is capable of designing fully de novo CDRs based solely on a given epitope and target structure, without reliance on existing …

The Arc Institute has launched the Virtual Cell Challenge, a new open competition to benchmark computational models that predict how human cells respond to genetic perturbations. Announced today and published in Cell (Vol. 188, Issue 13), the …

SandboxAQ has launched what it claims is the largest public dataset of protein-ligand complexes with associated binding affinity data. The database, called SAIR (Structurally Augmented IC50 Repository), contains approximately 5.2 million synthetic 3D structures covering over 1 million …

A new AI model from Google DeepMind, called AlphaGenome, has been released in preview for non-commercial research, offering a high-resolution, long-context DNA sequence model designed to predict the regulatory effects of genetic variants at scale.

XtalPi has signed a letter of intent with DoveTree LLC, a company founded by Harvard University professor Gregory Verdine, to develop small molecule and antibody drug candidates using XtalPi’s AI- and robotics-powered discovery platform. The collaboration will focus …