Now, the newly tenured professor in materials science and engineering believes AI is poised to transform science in ways never before possible. His work at MIT and beyond is devoted to accelerating that future. 'We're at a second inflection point,' Gomez-Bombarelli says. 'The first one was around 2015 with the first wave of representation learning, generative AI, and high-throughput data in some areas of science. Those are some of the techniques I first brought into my lab at MIT. Now I think we're at a second inflection point, mixing language and merging multiple modalities into general scientific intelligence. We're going to have all the model classes and scaling laws needed to reason about language, reason over material structures, and reason over synthesis recipes.' Gomez Bombarelli's research combines physics-based simulations with approaches like machine learning and generative AI to discover new materials with promising real-world applications. His work has led to new materials for batteries, catalysts, plastics, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). He has also co-founded multiple companies and served on scientific advisory boards for startups applying AI to drug discovery, robotics, and more. His latest company, Lila Sciences, is working to build a scientific superintelligence platform for the life sciences, chemical, and materials science industries....

Blackstone is working with a financial adviser to assess buyer interest from both private equity firms and strategic investors. A transaction could value the ICT business at more than $1bn, although discussions remain preliminary and no final decision has been taken. Interplex was acquired by Blackstone in 2022 from Baring Private Equity Asia, which has since been absorbed into EQT. The Singapore-based group manufactures components used in electric vehicles, autonomous driving systems, medical and life sciences equipment, and cloud computing infrastructure. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

Speaking to Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Tang said Asia offers both a vast source of demand and a powerful engine of innovation, with China playing a central role despite recent economic challenges. Tang said global investor sentiment towards China has improved over the past year after a period in which the market was widely viewed as 'uninvestable'. Investors are now reassessing risk and recognising the resilience of high-quality Chinese businesses, he said. He acknowledged that domestic consumption remains China's biggest risk, citing weak job creation, lingering stress in the property sector, and broader economic headwinds weighing on consumer confidence. Still, Tang said the scale of China's domestic market continues to underpin long-term investment opportunities. Innovation remains a key driver, particularly in life sciences, where Chinese companies are producing globally competitive products. Tang also expressed optimism about Hong Kong's capital markets, pointing to a strong pipeline of IPOs that could provide exit routes for private equity investors....

'We want to make a toolbox of magnetically remote-controlled protein functions,' says Andrew York, a physicist at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, California. York is a co-author of a study, published today in Nature, that deployed the magnet-responsive proteins in bacteria1, as well as a co-author of a separate preprint study2 that demonstrated the use of similar proteins in nematode worms. Two years ago, while working at the biotechnology company Calico Life Sciences in South San Francisco, York and his former colleague biochemist Maria Ingaramo discovered that green fluorescent protein (GFP), a workhorse in biotechnology that is used to label other molecules, dims in the presence of a weak magnet3. The effect was small ' the brightness of GFP dimmed by about 1% near a magnet ' so the researchers engineered a more responsive protein, called MagLOV, the fluorescence of which dims by half or more in the presence of a magnet. To explore how best to harness MagLOV's properties, a team led by biophysicist Gabriel Abrahams and bioengineer Harrison Steel, both at the University of Oxford, UK, tested the basis for its sensitivity to magnetic fields....