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The Government Just Banned Its Own Best AI Tool From Healthcare
Anthropic's Claude, the AI model widely considered the industry's most safety-focused, has been ordered out of all federal agency systems. The reason? Anthropic refused to let the Pentagon use its tools without guardrails against mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. One FDA employee said the ban "will basically wipe out 18 months of efforts," as the agency's own AI platform was built on Claude. Staff are being told to switch to Gemini or ChatGPT, but insiders say those models aren't built for the complex scientific analysis Claude was handling. The six-month phase-out clock is already ticking for federal agencies.
Why it matters: When the government labels an American AI company a "supply chain risk" (a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries like Huawei) for negotiating contract terms, it sends a chilling message to every tech firm building tools for drug development and regulatory science.
Read more →Deals and Financings
Europe Just Wrote a $1.2 Billion Check to Stop Losing Its Best Biotechs
Paris-based Jeito Capital closed the largest fund ever raised by an independent European biopharma investor: $1.2 billion. The firm has tripled its assets since 2021, backed by a global roster of sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and big pharma strategics. Jeito's playbook is simple: finance clinical-stage companies at inflection points, then sell them to pharma giants hungry for pipeline. Two early exits to Merck and Biogen totaled nearly $5 billion.
Read more →$137 Million for a Cancer Drug That Hasn't Dosed a Single Patient
Sidewinder Therapeutics raised $137 million in a Series B co-led by Frazier Life Sciences and Novartis Venture Fund, despite having zero clinical data. The company's bispecific ADC platform targets two receptors simultaneously (think a lock requiring two keys), aiming to kill tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. With big pharma paying billions for ADC assets, investors are betting the platform itself becomes an acquisition magnet.
Read more →Science and Discovery
The Deadly Condition With Zero Drugs Just Found Its First Lead
A University of Michigan team showed in mouse models that triglycerides directly cause abdominal aortic aneurysms, a condition that kills over 80% of patients if it ruptures and has zero approved drugs. Better yet, they showed an antisense drug targeting the ANGPTL3 protein cut triglycerides by 50% in mice and prevented aneurysms from forming. Several ANGPTL3-targeting therapies are already in human trials for other conditions, giving this discovery a rare head start.
Read more →Partnerships and Platforms
Biogen Bets on a New Shape of Antisense Drug
Biogen signed a multi-target deal with Alloy Therapeutics for access to the AntiClastic ASO platform, which changes the physical shape of antisense molecules to boost potency and reduce inflammation. It's a second source of ASO innovation beyond Biogen's longtime Ionis partnership, designed to unlock targets its current toolkit can't reach. Sanofi signed a similar Alloy deal valued at up to $400 million.
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