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Stanford researchers used artificial intelligence to identify BRP, a natural molecule that curbed appetite and burned fat in animals while seeming to avoid Ozempic's common side effects.

Researchers use carbon monoxide naturally produced by tumors to build toxic anticancer compounds inside cancer cells while sparing healthy ones.

Researchers have built a living biocomputer in which bacteria explore microscopic channel networks to solve hard mathematical problems, multiplying as they work to boost computing power.

A biotech startup connected an AI agent to lab equipment and let it carry out a brain injection on a living mouse, with human safeguards in place.

Researchers at the University of Washington have computationally designed synthetic proteases - enzymes that precisely cut other proteins at chosen sequences. Two studies published in Nature describe zinc-based metalloproteases and cysteine proteases created entirely from scratch using deep learning. These designer enzymes show rate enhancements millions to hundreds of millions of times faster than uncatalyzed reactions, and they work inside living cells. The work opens paths to destroying disease proteins, clearing misfolded proteins from neurodegenerative diseases, and activating drugs only in targeted tissues.

Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford professor of bioengineering and psychiatry, has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for developing optogenetics, a technique that uses light to control individual nerve cells in the living brain.

TJ102 combines two tumour targets and two drug payloads in an early-stage study that will assess safety and preliminary activity.

Could AI-designed proteins carry a hidden signature? Google DeepMind’s SynthID Bio embeds detectable watermarks that survived laboratory testing while preserving biological activity, opening a path to tracking their origins.

Anthropic announced that its AI model Claude discovered a novel CRISPR-like enzyme system in just 21 hours, a task that might have taken humans months. However, a computational biologist at the University of Copenhagen claims he identified the same proteins a year earlier, raising concerns that this may be part of a broader pattern of disputed AI research claims.