Roman Kasianov

In April, a Toronto-based startup called Biossilcame out of stealth with a total of $70 million in funding, co-led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and OpenAI. Their thesis is a bit different from what most AI biopharma companies are doing. Instead of designing new molecules, Biossil uses AI to dig through late-stage clinical failures and figure out which patient subgroups those drugs should have actually been tested on. Ten molecules were acquired while in stealth mode over three years.

AACR 2026 dropped its abstract data and the AI footprint is now large enough to read structurally. We dig into what ~1,100 AI-related abstracts reveal about where the field is actually moving. Elsewhere: a few deals and pipeline moves worth tracking, a €1B European fund close, and the ongoing question of who captures value when pharma and AI companies partner.

Boston-based Life Biosciences, co-founded by David Sinclair, has closed an $80 million Series D financing to fund its first-in-human clinical program and extend operations into 2027. The capital is allocated primarily to a Phase 1 trial of ER-100 in optic neuropathies and to further development of its Partial Epigenetic Reprogramming platform, which aims to modify cellular aging processes at the transcriptional level.