Brian Buntz
16 articles on Research & Development World
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Articles16
Mayo Clinic backs ViewsML in $4.9M round to advance virtual biomarker staining
ViewsML, the Vancouver-based company developing what it calls the world’s first virtual biomarker library, closed an oversubscribed $4.9 million seed round earlier this year. Wittington Ventures, the Toronto venture arm of the Weston family holding company, led the round. New investors Mayo Clinic and Continuum Health Ventures participated alongside repeat b
Medable’s Digital Data Flow Agent focuses on protocol translation as the agentic race accelerates
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
How Cypris evolved from selling patent reports to agentic R&D intelligence
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 202
MilliporeSigma’s CTO on AI retrosynthesis, the Merck KGaA–Siemens deal and the chemistry that runs the autonomous lab
Over the past decade and a half, the Darmstadt-based Merck KGaA has assembled a supplier that touches nearly every bench in the lab. It bought Millipore in 2010, with the membrane filters and Milli-Q water systems that had been lab staples since the 1950s, and added Sigma-Aldrich and its ubiquitous reagents catalog in 2015 for… The post MilliporeSigma’s CTO
OpenAI and Molecule.one report a near-autonomous AI chemist that improved a stubborn coupling reaction
OpenAI and Molecule.one have announced a system that improved a reaction medicinal chemists rely on but have long struggled to run reliably. OpenAI billed the news as a “near-autonomous AI chemist.” The setup paired one of OpenAI’s frontier models, GPT-5.4, with Maria, Molecule.one’s agentic chemistry AI, and an automated high-throughput lab. The chemistry t
NVIDIA Announces BioNeMo Agent Toolkit with traction from nearly 50 partners, including Lilly, Thermo Fisher and Dassault
NVIDIA has unveiled the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, an open, harness-agnostic platform that gives AI agents or software platforms the building blocks to specialize for science. Debuting with adoption from nearly 50 partners, including Eli Lilly, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Dassault Systèmes, the toolkit packages NVIDIA’s life-sciences software, models for tasks
Boltz built its drug-discovery API ‘for agents as much as for people’
Since AlphaFold 2 cracked protein-structure prediction in 2020 and 2021, a growing ecosystem of biomolecular models has followed, including Boltz, Chai, OpenFold and Protenix. Yet commercial access remains uneven. AlphaFold 3, launched in 2024, broadened the field from protein folding to biomolecular interactions, while its public server remains off-limits f
Six months in, Lilly says its supercomputer is starting to change the work with ‘near-infinite’ AI tokens
When Eli Lilly and NVIDIA unveiled what they called the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer in October 2025, the story was mostly about scale. The Lilly-owned system, now branded LillyPod, brings more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs into a DGX SuperPOD designed to support drug discovery, manufacturing, medical imaging and enterprise AI agen
Noetik’s TARIO-2: A ‘world model’ that reads a tumor from a single slide
Many patients who receive cancer immunotherapy do not respond to it, and oncologists still have few dependable ways to know in advance who will. By one estimate, only about 13% of all U.S. cancer patients stand to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, and drugmakers are increasingly betting on AI to improve those odds. Noetik, a South… The post Noetik’s TARIO-
OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol sets a coding record. Its own system card says it cheats sometimes.
As Anthropic’s Fable 5 remains pulled from public access under a U.S. government export-control directive, OpenAI soft-launched GPT-5.6 Sol on June 26 to its own “trusted partners.” OpenAI boasted that 5.6 is its strongest model yet and led with a coding result, a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1, the benchmark that scores… The post OpenAI’s GPT-5.
Countable Labs’ CTO Christina Fan on reimagining PCR, one molecule at a time
Countable Labs, a Palo Alto company built around direct single-molecule counting, has raised $26 million in an oversubscribed round to push its Countable PCR platform toward the clinic and global commercialization. Countable Labs’ twist on standard PCR doesn’t rely on microfluidics, physically isolating single DNA or RNA targets into over 30 million picolite
Waters targets large, heterogeneous drug modalities with three new mass spectrometry systems
Waters has been expanding and repositioning its mass spectrometry portfolio around the growing analytical challenges of large, heterogeneous and structurally complex drug modalities, molecules that increasingly resist full characterization by any single platform. At ASMS 2026, the company presented three complementary systems that together address this reali
Zenno becomes first company to operate a superconducting magnet in space, adds space veteran Andrew Rush to its board
The space superconductor company Zenno Astronautics says its Z01 Supertorquer has made it the first company to operate a superconducting product in space. The Auckland-founded company is framing the milestone as the moment its core technology stopped being a science project and became a sellable product. Zenno flew a superconducting magnet once before, in la
Anthropic says Claude can run science experiments now rather than just plan them
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says he doesn’t write prompts for Claude anymore. “My job is to write loops,” the head of Claude Code at Anthropic has said, describing a shift away from manual, turn-by-turn prompting toward building small systems that keep an agent working until a defined condition is met. Peter Steinberger,… The post Anthropic say
Elsevier expands LeapSpace with writing coach and Claim Radar, says 97% of users report time savings from the platform
2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. But 2026 arguably deserves that title. Adoption is climbing fast. One vendor tracking agent-building across 20,000 organizations found multi-agent systems grew 327% in under four months. Everyone from startups to big tech is shipping agents and agentic frameworks, including for science. Elsevier’s LeapSpace,
PharmSci 360 2026 heads to New Orleans this October
The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) will hold its 2026 PharmSci 360 meeting October 25 to 28 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. The event is the association’s flagship annual gathering, drawing thousands of scientists from across academia, industry, and government. AAPS, which counts roughly 7,000 members, posi