Martin Makary, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the U.S. FDA, took his turn before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee March 6, a week ahead of the committee’s confirmation votes on both him and Jay Bhattacharya as the next NIH director. The committee votes will set the stage for the full Senate to vote on confirming both nominees later this month.

Insilico Medicine founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov told BioWorld that he tries to spend as much time as possible in China, because that's where the artificial intelligence (AI) drug development company conducts synthesis and tests for early stage discovery. “And nowadays, not a day goes by without somebody launching an AI drug discovery company,” he said, noting that Chinese AI company Deepseek could be a huge disrupter.

A new multi-omics approach to unpicking how noncoding gene variants influence the development of common chronic diseases has identified tens of thousands of instances where variants have an impact on gene expression levels and gene splicing, the post-transcriptional modification that allows one gene to code for multiple proteins.

The first treatment for macular telangiectasia type 2 is set to enter the market following U.S. FDA approval of NT-501 (revakinagene taroretcel) from Neurotech Pharmaceuticals Inc., a privately held company that has been quietly advancing its encapsulated cell therapy platform for more than two decades.