AI-designed drug finally has human data
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Nº XCVII
- Date
- 11 Sep 2026
- Issue
- 97
- Stories
- Eight
- Editor
- ARC
Aging clocks, a petabyte of genome, and antimicrobials hunted with a coding agent — busy 24 hours.
Insilico's AI-designed drug moves proteomic aging clocks
Insilico Medicine reported that rentosertib, an AI-designed molecule that has already reached patients, showed shifts toward younger predicted biological age across six proteomic aging clocks. Caveats travel with it: a company-reported readout, and proteomic clocks are still contested as surrogate measures of anything. But aging clocks have mostly lived in observational cohorts and supplement studies, and seeing six of them read out on a molecule that started as an AI design puts two literatures in the same room. It also moves the AI-discovery argument off in silico scores and onto human proteomics — the evidence base the field has been thinnest on.
DeepMind ships a genome atlas 30x AlphaFold's size
Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, a one-petabyte resource the company says is over 30 times the size of the AlphaFold Database, wrapped in a browsing layer that ties the interconnected datasets together instead of leaving them as separate downloads. The AlphaFold database changed which structural questions a researcher could ask without running anything. A regulatory-genome equivalent at that scale puts variant-effect work on the same footing, queryable as a reference resource rather than a compute job.
De la Fuente lab uses Codex to hunt new antibiotics
Codex is scanning extinct genomes for antimicrobial candidates in César de la Fuente's lab, per an OpenAI case study: Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, paired with ChatGPT, searching living and extinct genomes for molecules that might work against drug-resistant infections. What's absent is the point. No purpose-built biology model sits in the loop, so the discovery work runs on general tools already available, shifting the question from whether a foundation model exists for a task to how much scaffolding a general agent needs around it.
New method picks which CRISPR hits to test next
Adaptive hit discovery turns CRISPR screens into a loop: a model proposes the next batch of perturbations, the assay answers, and the selection policy carries across screens instead of being refit per experiment. Advances screen automation, where follow-up rounds are still mostly hand-picked.
OpenAI opens a managed service for cloud agents
OpenAI launched the Agents API , a managed service built on the same machinery that runs Codex, covering orchestration, long-running sessions and tool use. Long-running is the operative phrase for biology, where an analysis routinely outlives a chat session and hosting has been the builder's problem, not the vendor's.
EukaUTR models and designs eukaryotic 3' UTRs
EukaUTR predicts and designs eukaryotic 3' UTRs as a general model rather than one fit to a single organism or reporter. Extends sequence design into the untranslated regions that set mRNA stability and translation rate, the tunable part of any mRNA therapeutic.
Benchmark tests agents on long multimodal research tasks
Mr.LHDR scores agents on long-horizon research tasks spanning figures, tables and text; the name unpacks to Multimodal Real-World Long-Horizon Deep Research. That combination is where literature-scale biology work actually lives, and it has been the thinnest part of the benchmark shelf.
Genomic language model predicts fungal essential genes
A genomic language model transfers essentiality prediction across fungal species without per-species retraining. Points antifungal target selection at genomes nobody has screened, which matters as resistant Candida and Aspergillus keep spreading.
Reply with your discoveries. A human reads them. Forward freely.
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