When Becton, Dickinson and Company launched its Incada Connected Care Platform in October 2025 with the next-generation Pyxis Pro dispensing system, it framed the move as a way to turn data from nearly 3 million smart connected BD devices into actionable insights on medication inventory, waste and clinician workflows. Omar Ahmed, who joined BD as…

ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat backers including Debiopharm. In an…

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) will hold its 2026 PharmSci 360 meeting October 25 to 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is the association’s flagship annual gathering, drawing thousands of scientists from across academia, industry, and government. AAPS, which counts roughly 7,000 members, positions PharmSci 360…

A new study published in Nature found that Antarctic ice loss is remarkably predictable for the next few decades, but varies by glacier. Near-term Antarctic ice loss is linearly predictable through the mid-21st century, but this predictability isn’t a single number. Instead, it’s governed by a physical property called “reservoir timescale” which swings from roughly…

When researchers tuned in to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) public webinars on its new $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative, including one held on June 30, they got a consistent answer to nearly every question about eligibility, IP ownership, milestone design and selection criteria: it depends, and we’ll work it out with you. The NSF X-Labs…

2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. But 2026 arguably deserves that title. Adoption is climbing fast. One vendor tracking agent-building across 20,000 organizations found multi-agent systems grew 327% in under four months. Everyone from startups to big tech is shipping agents and agentic frameworks, including for science. Elsevier’s LeapSpace, which…

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says he doesn’t write prompts for Claude anymore. “My job is to write loops,” the head of Claude Code at Anthropic has said, describing a shift away from manual, turn-by-turn prompting toward building small systems that keep an agent working until a defined condition is met. Peter Steinberger,…

The space superconductor company Zenno Astronautics says its Z01 Supertorquer has made it the first company to operate a superconducting product in space. The Auckland-founded company is framing the milestone as the moment its core technology stopped being a science project and became a sellable product. Zenno flew a superconducting magnet once before, in late…

A comprehensive analysis of the expected shelf-lives of the entire 2023 ISS formulary found that 54 of 91 medications have a terrestrial shelf-life of 36 months or less, which could be accelerated by space radiation. As NASA aims for Mars missions, which take about 200 days, resupply becomes unrealistic. Now, researchers at the University of…

Waters has been expanding and repositioning its mass spectrometry portfolio around the growing analytical challenges of large, heterogeneous and structurally complex drug modalities, molecules that increasingly resist full characterization by any single platform. At ASMS 2026, the company presented three complementary systems that together address this reality: the Xevo MRT P10 high-throughput discovery platform, the…

 An incredible era has begun as neurosurgical devices, robotics and connectivity come together to expand access to life-saving stroke care. The FDA approved the first clot-busting stroke drug in 1996 and only recently approved the second. In those three decades, medtech developers have created first-of-their-kind thrombectomy devices for faster and safer clot removal. But…

Countable Labs, a Palo Alto company built around direct single-molecule counting, has raised $26 million in an oversubscribed round to push its Countable PCR platform toward the clinic and global commercialization. Countable Labs’ twist on standard PCR doesn’t rely on microfluidics, physically isolating single DNA or RNA targets into over 30 million picoliter-sized compartments within…

As Anthropic’s Fable 5 remains pulled from public access under a U.S. government export-control directive, OpenAI soft-launched GPT-5.6 Sol on June 26 to its own “trusted partners.” OpenAI boasted that 5.6 is its strongest model yet and led with a coding result, a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the benchmark that scores…

Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South…

When Eli Lilly and NVIDIA unveiled what they called the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer in October 2025, the story was mostly about scale. The Lilly-owned system, now branded LillyPod, brings more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a DGX SuperPOD designed to support drug discovery, manufacturing, medical imaging and enterprise AI agents. At January’s…

The NSF’s new draft policy simultaneously requires researchers to publish open access immediately and proposes to eliminate the grant funding that pays for it at many journals, but fails to define exactly which publication costs are allowed.  The NSF is renewing and revising its financial assistance policies and procedures document, renaming the longstanding Proposal and…

The 11th BioPharma Supply Chain & Logistics Nexus runs Nov. 11-12, 2026, at the Crowne Plaza San Diego Mission Valley in California. The invitation-only event covers pharma and life-sciences supply chain operations, with sessions on cold chain logistics, temperature-controlled distribution, warehousing, inventory and procurement, alongside regulatory and sustainability topics. The format centers on executive presentations,…

The specialty materials maker Elkem Silicones has rebranded as Bluestar Silicones, reviving a name the business used from 2007 to 2017. The change follows the April 30 close of Bluestar’s acquisition of the majority of Elkem’s silicones division. The company says manufacturing sites, production processes, raw materials, product names and commercial trademarks all stay the same,…

Since AlphaFold 2 cracked protein-structure prediction in 2020 and 2021, a growing ecosystem of biomolecular models has followed, including Boltz, Chai, OpenFold and Protenix. Yet commercial access remains uneven. AlphaFold 3, launched in 2024, broadened the field from protein folding to biomolecular interactions, while its public server remains off-limits for commercial use. DeepMind’s commercial engine…

NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks such as protein-structure prediction, molecular…

OpenAI and Molecule.one have announced a system that improved a reaction medicinal chemists rely on but have long struggled to run reliably. OpenAI billed the news as a “near-autonomous AI chemist.” The setup paired one of OpenAI’s frontier models, GPT-5.4, with Maria, Molecule.one’s agentic chemistry AI, and an automated high-throughput lab. The chemistry target was…

Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for…

Over the past year, the AI-eats-software camp, which includes sell-side strategists at Jefferies and, more cautiously, analysts at Bain, has warned that generative AI could eat into the seat-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In some respects, those fears have been justified. After Anthropic released plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent earlier in 2026,…

In January 2024, Medable, the decentralized clinical-trial company headquartered in Palo Alto, used AI to translate a study protocol directly into a configured eCOA mobile app, complete with questionnaires, workflows and translation into roughly 25 languages. The company said then the feature could halve eCOA deployment timelines, which had typically run 12 to 16 weeks.…

For years, international climate targets have been calculated using the assumption that the world’s northern permafrost would act as a carbon sink through the end of the century. Now, a paper published in Science Advances finds that the northern land carbon sink will become a carbon source in the 2050s.  The northern permafrost region, which…