Through the pipeline
AI is transforming the drug development pipeline, from finding targets faster and designing molecules more precisely to supporting the development of those discoveries. Iterative Health secured $77M to scale its AI-powered clinical research network and improve trial enrollment. The FDA launched a real-time clinical trial review pilot with AstraZeneca and Amgen that lets regulators assess evidence as it’s collected. Next up? Proving whether AI-designed drugs can translate into patient outcomes, which may be on the docket soon as DeepMind’s Isomorphic Labs prepares to take its candidates into human trials after raising a whopping $2.1B.
The mix of players driving AI’s expansion across the pipeline is also broadening. Eli Lilly and Profluent partnered on AI-designed gene editors, while AWS launched a “lab-in-the-loop” drug discovery platform to tighten feedback cycles between computational biologists and experimentation. In another sign that frontier AI and biopharma are moving closer together, Anthropic appointed Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board. Meanwhile, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub committed $500M to build predictive AI models of human cells, a bet on biological datasets as strategic infrastructure for AI drug discovery. Beyond efficiency gains alone, the next phase of AI in drug development will require addressing the challenges with the technology itself: improving the quality of the data to train models, ability to validate predictions in humans, and building public trust in medicine shaped by AI.
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Recent Funding
- Forus lands $160M to automate prescriptions’ administrative backend
- 9amHealth nabs $26M to expand into conditions driving employer specialty pharmacy spend
- Tokaido Health secures $25M to launch its medication benefits navigation platform
- Optura lands $17.5M for its enterprise platform tracking ROI for healthcare AI initiatives
- Anomaly Insights bags $17M for its payer intelligence platform built for health systems
- Clara closes $12M to launch AI-powered primary care platform
- Knit Health seeds $11.6M to improve health system scheduling and care transitions
- Urologic Health snags $11M for its non-invasive bladder function monitoring platform
- To speed physician credentialing, Saile grabs $2.2M
- Chromie Health scores $2M for its SMS nursing staffing agent