OmniAb and Eli Lilly sign global ion channel collaboration

GSK announced a new collaboration with Chai Discovery to apply AI-driven protein design across its drug discovery pipeline. The partnership gives GSK access to Chai Discovery's protein folding and design models focused on early stage R&D, and internal GSK evaluations reported hits against all tested targets when using those AI tools in preclinical research. The company operates as a global pharmaceutical group focused on vaccines, specialty medicines, and general treatments, with a market value of about £70.1 billion, so any impact from the collaboration will sit within a large and diversified drug portfolio. The deal is a concrete test of GSK's AI-led R&D pillar rather than a side bet, though relying more on external AI partners adds execution risk on top of patent cliffs and pressure in General Medicines that analysts already flag. Simply Wall St's analysis points to a £21.73 fair value for GSK.

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.