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Letter 18: One Person Biotechs, The Costco Model, Drug Development Funds, Upcoming Events, and more!

London Longevity

Welcome back to the London Longevity Newsletter 🗞️

We just hosted our 4th AI x Bio Roundtables yesterday!

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Appreciate everyone that came out and made it such an engaging and interesting. The summary will follow in a separate article but here is a quick peek from the action last night.

October highlights down here:

IN THE SPOTLIGHT

UCL-developed immune rejuvenation technology attracts pharma interest. Developed from Professor Alessio Lanna’s research, the DoS platform aims to restore function in ageing and exhausted T cells. An unnamed pharmaceutical company will independently evaluate the technology, while preparations continue for a first-in-human Phase 1 trial at UCL and UCLH.

Anthropic acquires Mithril Medicine, a biotech with just one full-time employee. Founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to coordinate experiments across 11 external labs, alongside part-time consultants, taking a muscular dystrophy programme from idea to promising mouse results in under 18 months. Its programmes now form Anthropic’s first in-house drug pipeline, a test of what it calls the “Pipeline-in-a-Person” model.

Beyond Mithril, Anthropic shares early results from six drug-development collaborations. Generate Biomedicines used Claude to help redesign a CAR-T component, producing a version around 70% shorter that improved tumour-cell killing in lab tests. Divergence Labs generated roughly 35,000 antibody designs for food allergies, identifying experimental hits that could help detach IgE from immune cells. BigHat Biosciences tested around 1,010 antibody variants in 10 weeks, improving binding, stability and resistance to aggregation. Enveda reports an 89% reduction in human review time for manufacturing documentation. Bristol Myers Squibb is exploring clinical-trial planning and assessment, while The Column Group is establishing Pleiades, a company testing whether small teams using Claude can run more ambitious drug pipelines. The work remains early and mostly preclinical, but spans the process from molecule design to manufacturing, company building and clinical development.

AstraZeneca partners with insitro to discover treatments for liver disease MASH and cardiomyopathies. The deal includes $40M upfront, with up to approximately $1.46bn in potential milestones. insitro’s Virtual Human platform will combine human and cellular data with AI to identify disease drivers and advance drug candidates.

A new potential target for rejuvenation? Researchers identify the RNA-splicing factor SRSF1 through a screen for genes that restore youthful patterns of gene expression. Increasing SRSF1 reduced several ageing-associated changes in human cells and was associated with a 14% increase in median lifespan in aged mice. Promising early work, although the mouse groups were small and human benefits remain untested.

Ferring signs an agreement to acquire Gameto in a transaction worth up to $1.38bn, subject to milestones and closing conditions. Gameto uses cell engineering to develop treatments for women’s reproductive health, starting with infertility. A substantial potential deal for the reproductive-health space; its egg-maturation programme remains investigational in the US.

London-based DaltonTx receives Gates Foundation funding to apply AI, protein-structure prediction and physics-based modelling to tuberculosis drug discovery. Working with non-profit Ersilia, the team will make validated models, datasets and workflows accessible to researchers across the Global South.

Formation Bio announces a $600M drug-development fund, aiming to acquire and advance 10–15 clinical-stage programmes over the next 3-5 years. Each programme will sit in a separate company, sharing Formation’s AI platform, clinical team and operating infrastructure. A bet on expanding development capacity as AI accelerates discovery, and leaves more promising drugs competing for resources to reach patients. And perhaps a slight nod to Andrew Lo’s thesis.

Some encouraging news for UK clinical research: government figures report a 35% reduction in average commercial trial set-up times, from 153 to 100 days in the reported year-on-year comparison. The figures cover 24 trials set up in January-March 2026, a useful sign of progress on getting studies running faster.

And a fresh November update: Cambridge-based bit.bio raises $25M in Series D funding to expand its range of human cell models for research and drug development. The company reports paid vial volumes up 76% year to date. As AI generates more hypotheses, the demand for reproducible human biology to test them against is growing too.

WHAT’S ON IN THE LONDON SCENE?

London Life Sciences Week is coming up on 15-20 November, bringing biotech founders, scientists, pharma teams and investors together across the city. Check out the programme for talks, networking and partnering events.

Also worth checking out the free partneringONE access during London Life Sciences Week to discover attendees and arrange meetings.

Other events from the ecosystem include:

GREAT OPPORTUNITIES

BIA’s TechBio Boost is accepting applications from UK techbio companies building from Seed towards Series A. Get mentoring, strategic support and access to investors and industry leaders. Apply by 23 November.

Early-stage UK biotech founders can apply for BioLabs’ Founder-Mentor Connect programme at Wellcome Genome Campus, offering tailored mentoring and an investor showcase in May 2027. Applications close 20 November.

Portal Biotech is hiring in London for Product Development Scientist, Biologics Production Scientist, and various software and hardware engineering roles, to help build its single-molecule protein sequencer.

London roles at Isomorphic Labs include Computational Drug Design, Biologics Computational Science, Biologics Pharmacology, and Head of External Drug Discovery Operations.

Senior Machine Learning Scientist - BioAI at Novo Nordisk, based in London, working on cellular foundation models and AI for biological discovery.

Applications are open for the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s four-year PhD programme for 2027 entry, spanning genomics, human genetics and computational biology.

Applied Scientist and Research Engineer (Internships) at Mistral in London.

The MRC Functional Genomics PhD programme is offering up to 18 funded studentships across six UK universities, including Imperial and King’s, combining experimental biology, genomics and AI.

Head of Operations (Biomanufacturing) at Scindo in London.

CRUK Manchester’s 2027 PhD programme includes a project on aged immune failure and reversal. Applications close today, 6 November, at 5pm GMT.

WHAT WE READ LAST MONTH

Clinical Development in an Age of Cheap Molecules by Soleil Wizman.

Computer Chips Are the Most Magnificent Things Humanity Has Ever Made in the New Yorker.

14 clinical trials testing drugs with totally new targets at ESMO by Samuel Hume.

Deal Feelings.

Who actually invented the top 30 [drugs]? by Mike Rea

Image: From Mike Rea

Biosecurity Strategy.

“Biotech is a wood chipper that like is built to like ingest souls and shred them.” Matt Gline CEO of Roivant in an interview whilst talking about AI in biotech.

Pipeline-in-a-Person will help AI accelerate R&D by Egan Peltan.

Commanding Heights.

Costco is a Model for Drug Middlemen, Not Drug Inventors by Peter Kolchinsky.

FROM THE COMMUNITY

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That’s a wrap on this one!

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