Scaling Biotech

Scaling Biotech

Home
Archive
About
Summer Vacation
I’m going to take a break from posting from now through August.
 • 
Jesse Johnson
The first "AI Scientist" won't be a chat bot
I’ve been wanting to write about the interesting work that FutureHouse has been doing on reasoning models for biology, but I’m torn about how to frame…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
Did a foundation model just solve virtual small molecule screening?
Last week, a team of researchers at MIT, with support from Recursion, published a new foundation model called Boltz-2 that a lot of people are very…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
Can AI solve drug repurposing?
Nature Medicine recently published an article called A foundation model for clinician-centered drug repurposing that caught my attention because its use…
 • 
Jesse Johnson

May 2025

Can you model biology mechanistically?
As part of the new direction that I’ve been taking this newsletter in, I’ve been exploring a bunch of different scientific applications of AI in pharma…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
2
Are foundation models the new moat?
Back in April, Tempus AI announced a strategic agreement with the pharma company AstraZeneca and a startup called Pathos, to build a Biology Foundation…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
Autonomous Discovery Starts with Automation
Two weeks ago, I wrote about an emerging category of software using LLMs to help labs translate manual experiment protocols into automation scripts.
 • 
Jesse Johnson
1
Can an AI beat an in vivo model?
Last week, Axiom Bio came out of stealth mode with the goal of eliminating drug toxicity without using animals.
 • 
Jesse Johnson
1

April 2025

Is it an AI scientist or a Potato?
Potato (yes, that’s its name), a startup building “Autonomous agents for science,” recently announced a $4.5M funding round. This is big sign of…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
1
The race begins for an FDA-approved AI toxicity model
The FDA recently announced that they’re working on phasing out animal testing requirements in favor of “AI-based computational models”, at least for…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
What will happen to Dotmatics now?
The big news this month, just in time for the annual Bio-IT conference, was the acquisition of Dotmatics by Siemens for $5.1 billion.
 • 
Jesse Johnson
A new(ish) Scaling Biotech
After the brief hiatus I announced in March, I've decided to make some changes to this newsletter that I think will make it more interesting both for…
 • 
Jesse Johnson
© 2025 Jesse Johnson
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture