When de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences revealed last year that it was attempting to 'resurrect' the dire wolf from genetic material found in fossils, we argued that, despite the controversy surrounding the project, the company was building valuable technologies that justify its $10.2 billion valuation. It's not clear who is leading the new round, or how much capital the five-year-old company is looking to raise. But we do know, according to the report, that Colossal has started generating revenue over the last year. Colossal has spun out three startups, including Breaking, a company that helps break down plastics; Form Bio, a computational biology platform that secured $30 million in funding; and Astromech, an AI-driven predictive modeling company focused on biology and life sciences, which was valued at $2 billion in March. The company, which operates out a 55,000-square-foot headquarters in Dallas, keeps finding new applications for its core science, too. In late April, it added the bluebuck antelope as its sixth target species, while late last month, its nonprofit conservation arm, the Colossal Foundation, struck a University of Tasmania partnership to help protect Tasmanian devils from a contagious facial cancer....

Miles Wang, an OpenAI researcher whose work includes using AI to accelerate scientific and biological discovery, is leaving the ChatGPT maker to launch a new startup focused on developing AI models for drug discovery, according to four people with knowledge of his plans. Several other OpenAI researchers are expected to join the new company. Wang is in talks to raise about $200 million at a $2 billion valuation, two of the people said. Lightspeed is in discussions to lead the funding round, according to sources. Talks are ongoing, the deal may not be final and details could change. The funding discussions point to investor interest in applying AI to make breakthroughs in life sciences. Chai Discovery, a two-year-old startup developing AI models that can predict molecular interactions to identify new drugs, announced on Tuesday that it raised $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation. (Co-founder Josh Meier also passed through OpenAI as a researcher.) Meanwhile, Google DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs, which also develops AI models for drug discovery, raised a $2.1 billion Series B in May....

Anthropic introduced Claude Science on Tuesday, an AI workbench that gives scientists one environment to do computational research, sparing them the hassle of bouncing between databases, pipelines, and tools. To be clear, Anthropic says Claude Science is 'not a new AI model and not a more capable model for biology. It runs the same Claude models already available to everyone today (including Claude Opus 4.8), with no special access and no gating.' The workbench builds on Anthropic's October 2025 launch of Claude for Life Sciences, which essentially augmented the Claude chatbot by making it better at life sciences tasks. Claude Science is a dedicated place to do that work. The launch, announced Tuesday at an AI for Science briefing, fits into Anthropic's broader push to be more than a model provider and to further own the operating layer for specific industries, the way Claude Code has become the operating layer for software development. Anthropic is increasingly betting its growth on vertical, workflow-level products rather than just raw model capability (which could shape how it competes, and prices, against rivals)....

Whitney Henry and Harikesh Wong have been named 2026 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the 21-member class of early-career researchers, which includes the two MIT scientists as well as two alumni, on June 16. Each scholar will receive four years of funding to pursue cutting-edge research into human health and disease. Xin Gu PhD '22 of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Christina Tringides '15 of Rice University were also selected as scholars. Henry, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will use the Pew scholarship to examine how a stress-induced cell death program called ferroptosis contributes to injury and regeneration in the liver. Wong, assistant professor of biology at MIT and core member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will use his award to investigate how groups of immune cells reach a 'communal decision' about whether to tolerate or attack a particular target....