Big Picture Bio Launches With £2.2 Million to Design Cancer Combination Therapies

Isomorphic Labs, the AI-powered drug discovery startup spun out of Alphabet's Google DeepMind, is in early talks to raise new funds at a valuation of at least $40B, according to Bloomberg. The round could value Isomorphic as highly as $50B, one of the sources said, though the financing has not closed and details could change. The talks come only five months after Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1B in its Series B funding effort. Separately, the US government and tech giants Meta Platforms and Google parent Alphabet are joining nonprofit Biohub to build open datasets to train AI models for biological research, bringing total investment in the effort to $1.8B, Biohub said on Wednesday. Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are jointly investing $300M in that effort.

The US government, Meta Platforms, and Google parent Alphabet are joining the nonprofit research organization Biohub to build open datasets for training artificial intelligence models for biological research. Biohub announced the move on the 7th, and total investment in the effort is expected to reach $1.8 billion. Meta, Google's DeepMind, and drug-discovery startup Isomorphic Labs will jointly invest $300 million in Biohub. The US Department of Energy will contribute more than $500 million over the next five years for laboratory measurement, modeling, and computation, while the National Institutes of Health will provide more than $500 million in federal funding to coordinate datasets and repositories built to date, which Biohub will standardize for AI training. Biohub is run as a philanthropic effort by Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Paris-based biotechnology and AI company Rivercell has launched with a $25 million seed round led by HV to build data platforms and AI models that predict how human cells respond to treatment. HCVC, Alven and Bpifrance Digital Venture also participated in the round, which will fund the scale-up of Rivercell's proprietary data generation platform, the expansion of its wet lab in Paris, and the launch of its AI Virtual Cell program. The company was started in summer 2025 by CEO Yann Fleureau, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur behind AI company Cardiologs, and was joined in 2026 by co-founder and Chief Science Officer Eric Durand, an AI scientist and former C-Level executive at AI drug discovery unicorn Owkin. Rivercell's indication-agnostic world model is designed to predict how human cells respond to a drug or genetic change in silico, reducing the need for physical wet-lab experiments, with the company describing its purpose-built platform as the GPU for the bio data center of the future. Dr. Charlotte Bunne of EPFL and Prof. Fabian Theis of Helmholtz Munich have joined Rivercell's Scientific Advisory Board, and the company is also backed by angel investors including founders and executives from Twist Bioscience, DNA Script, Agilent and Abivax/Ipsen.

Therna Biosciences appointed Kevin Green, former Chief Business Officer of Inceptive, as Chief Operating Officer and added two AI technical leaders to its advisory team, while the NIH Common Fund selected the company as a Phase I winner of its Targeting RNA in Disease with Novel Technologies Challenge. Green, who joined Therna in August and brings more than 20 years of experience across AI-enabled drug discovery and RNA therapeutics, leads the company's operations and business development as its RNA-Logix platform moves into partnered and internal programs. The new AI advisors are Dr. Dave Burke, the first Chief Technology Officer of Arc Institute and previously Vice President of Engineering for Android at Google, and Mr. Harsh Mehta, co-founder and CTO of Mirendil and previously a Senior Research Scientist at Anthropic and a researcher at Google. Therna is one of 25 Phase I winners of the three-phase TRDNT Challenge, which offers up to $13.1 million in total awards as teams develop and validate their technologies through 2027. Therna's winning proposal introduces a co-scientist agent built on RNA-Logix that designs and optimizes sequence-specific activating antisense oligonucleotides for ultra-rare haploinsufficiencies.