Research & Development World

Over the past year, the AI-eats-software camp, which includes sell-side strategists at Jefferies and, more cautiously, analysts at Bain, has warned that generative AI could eat into the seat-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. In some respects, those fears have been justified. After Anthropic released plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent earlier in 2026,… The post How Cypris evolved from se…

In January 2024, Medable, the decentralized clinical-trial company headquartered in Palo Alto, used AI to translate a study protocol directly into a configured eCOA mobile app, complete with questionnaires, workflows and translation into roughly 25 languages. The company said then the feature could halve eCOA deployment timelines, which had typically run 12 to 16 weeks.… The post Medable’s Digita…

For years, international climate targets have been calculated using the assumption that the world’s northern permafrost would act as a carbon sink through the end of the century. Now, a paper published in Science Advances finds that the northern land carbon sink will become a carbon source in the 2050s.  The northern permafrost region, which… The post How a new permafrost climate model fits a dan…

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has issued a formal Request for Information (RFI) regarding a proposal to limit the number of Research Project Grants (RPGs) an individual investigator can hold simultaneously. The agency is considering caps ranging from two to four grants per Principal Investigator (PI) or Multi-Principal Investigator (MPI).  A cap of four… The post The NIH is proposing a …

A blog post from the AI image company announced the launch of a whole-body ultrasound scanner users would step into through a pool of water. “We’re building a bold new kind of machine to reimagine the foundations of healthcare and our relationships to our bodies,” the company noted. The “Ultrasonic CT” will be featured in… The post AI image firm Midjourney spins up medical division, unveils ‘Ultr…

The Trump administration has reclassified approximately 8,000 senior-level career officials across 54 agencies to Schedule Policy/Career, formerly Schedule F, status. The move strips the employees of standard civil service job protections, making it easier to remove them from their positions. Approximately 97% of those reclassified hold GS-15 or senior leadership positions. Agencies can remove Sc…

Days after going public, SpaceX has reached a market capitalization of about $2.5 trillion, even with its stock skidding in midday trading on June 17. At the time of writing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was worth more than the next four billionaires on Earth combined. SpaceX laid out its vision weeks ago in its S-1,… The post SpaceX is now worth nearly as much as 41 aerospace peers combined. Its revenue…

The House Appropriations Committee has approved the Fiscal Year 2027 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. The bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $189.3 billion, which is 3% below the FY 2026 level. While the bill includes several increases to medical research, it also codifies some significant reductions and… The post House bill puts …

Over the past two years, software engineering has handed a growing share of its routine work to AI agents. At one end of the spectrum, companies ranging from Google to Anthropic use AI to write the bulk of their code. At the other, there are reports of the bills coming due for heavy users at… The post Q&A: Owkin’s five-year Sanofi deal bets on ‘purpose-built’ AI agents appeared first on Research …

Continuing a Biden-era push accelerated by the Trump administration, the NIH is making research findings available to the public and requiring NIH-funded researchers to deposit the author-accepted version of their peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC) and make it available at the time of publication. Many publishers enforce a six to 12-month embargo period before… The post The NIH trie…

Axiom Space and Prada unveiled the Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment (LCVG), the inner layer of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU), this week. The garment was designed for NASA’s Artemis IV, which is scheduled to land on the moon in 2028.  “By bringing together the best in both aerospace engineering as well as luxury… The post The science behind the Prada-designed spacesuit for A…

In April 2026, OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy, now a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, posted an architectural overview on GitHub. The project itself, which he called an “LLM wiki,” has generated significant buzz, though nothing approaching OpenClaw, the agent framework that became one of the most successful projects in GitHub history. The tweet that… The post Is Karpathy’s viral LLM wiki…

Researchers at Washington University have genetically engineered hookworms to produce and secrete a human antibody, creating a “living pharmaceutical biofactory,” according to the study published in Nature Communications.  To survive within the human gut, hookworms secrete over 800 molecules to modulate inflammation and maintain homeostasis.  “We thought: what if we make it secrete one more… The …

The Trump administration is dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a $368 million network of over 900 deep-ocean instruments that provide researchers with real-time, long-term data on marine ecosystems, coastal environments and global climate patterns.  This could lead to permanent gaps in long-term oceanographic datasets, disrupting longitudinal studies on climate change and ocean…

How facility design, containment, and cleaning validation decisions determine commercial yield and time-to-market. Scaling spray drying from lab success to commercial production is one of the most complex transitions in pharmaceutical manufacturing. While early-stage results may appear promising, many organizations underestimate how facility design, safety systems, and day-to-day operations affec…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) has launched a differential scanning calorimeter built to test fully assembled coin cells, eliminating the cell teardown step that has long made DSC-based battery safety work slow and destructive. The Waters TA Instruments Coin Cell Differential Scanning Calorimeter (DSC) scans fully assembled coin cells from -80 °C to 600 °C while… The post Waters targets earlier thermal…

Digital pathology matured quickly during the pandemic, when remote work needs and temporary FDA enforcement discretion lowered the perceived barriers to whole-slide imaging. Capital followed. Roche’s May agreement to acquire PathAI for up to $1.05 billion, pending closing, is only the most recent sign of how much money is chasing the field. The most valuable… The post Leica, Indica Labs and Lunit…

At Microsoft Build 2026, the software giant’s annual developer conference, held June 2 and 3 in San Francisco, the life sciences AI company Causaly announced a collaboration with Microsoft aimed at one of drug discovery’s earliest and most consequential decisions: which biological targets are worth pursuing. Causaly runs an agentic AI platform that reads across… The post Causaly and Microsoft tar…

Claude Mythos was one of the most hyped models in recent memory. And it is out now. Sort of. Yesterday Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5, a generally available model built on the same weights as Mythos 5 that switches over to the older Opus 4.8 for most tasks that even mention cybersecurity or biology. Early… The post How Claude Fable 5 stacks up against Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 appeared first on Res…

A team of researchers recently uncovered living microorganisms on the remains of the 5,300-year-old Iceman, revealing a methodological gap in modern genomics. In a study published in Microbiome, the team showed that while DNA analysis can map the presence of ancient genetic material, traditional petri dish cultivation remains necessary to determine if those microorganisms are… The post Beyond the…