Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and collaborators have analyzed what cell types are infected by hantaviruses and how infection alters gene expression.

“The impoverished laboratory environment in which mice and rats are maintained has been very good at increasing experimental replicability,” Steven Austad told the audience at the 12th Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting (ARDD) in Copenhagen last week. “But at the cost of sacrificing translational relevance.”

CDT Equity Inc. has deployed an AI-led drug repurposing strategy for its portfolio and identified a new biological target and novel therapeutic indication for its lead program, AZD-1656 (and its derivatives).

South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) launched a new industry-academia-research consortium to support the nation’s organoid industry, expected to grow in light of the U.S. FDA’s shift away from animal testing in the development of novel drugs.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a generative AI model that was able to generate novel antibiotic structures from either chemical fragments or de novo, starting from ammonia, methane, water or no starting point at all. In a study that was published online in Cell, the team tested two dozen of more than 10 million structures that were proposed as potential antibiotics by the model.

Quantumpharm Inc., known as Xtalpi Inc., announced receiving $51 million up front from a potential $5.99 billion deal with Dovetree LLC on Aug. 6. The collaboration, first inked through a letter of intent between the two parties on June 23, will combine Shenzhen, China-based Xtalpi’s AI-based and robotics-driven discovery platform with Dovetree’s “biological insights.” The goal will be to select and validate potential first-in-class candidates for Dovetree across five areas of oncology, immunology and inflammatory diseases, neurological disorders and metabolic dysregulation.

Neucore Bio Inc. announced it has been awarded a US$304,000 National Science Foundation Small Business Technology Transfer grant to evaluate scalable manufacturing of exosome-based gene delivery methods.

Deep learning tools for protein design can also be used to create molecules that bind to them. Certain peptides, such as intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), are challenging to target due to their variable nature. However, scientists from the lab of Nobel laureate David Baker have developed a method to generate binders for IDPs by searching the world’s largest protein database with their AI-powered tool RFdiffusion.