June 12, 2026
Barry Bunin, PhD
Founder & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery
“First AI Drug Enters Clinical Development.” That’s the headline for an article in Drug Discovery News about the announcement from CRDMO Quotient Sciences about a Phase I study of the drug was initiated at the company’s UK facility following approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). The study will assess the safety and pharmacokinetics of an oral solid dose formulation in healthy volunteers. Quotient Sciences believes the drug is the first formulated by AI to be evaluated in the clinic. The article quotes Andy Lewis, Chief Scientific Officer at Quotient Sciences, as saying “This program marks a significant advancement in harnessing the power of advanced machine learning alongside deep scientific expertise to streamline drug development.”
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“The Science Around GLP-1 Drugs and Cancer is Suddenly Getting a Lot More Interesting.” The Washington Post carries that headline about new studies fueling optimism about the drugs’ potential role in prevention and treatment — especially in breast, colon and lung cancer. The article reports on this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, where more than 40 studies, abstracts, oral presentations and poster presentations examined the relationship between GLP-1-based drugs and cancer. The results were strikingly consistent. Taken together, they suggest that people taking medications such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro may develop certain cancers at lower rates than comparable patients who are not taking the drugs — and that those already diagnosed may experience a slower decline and better outcomes. The article notes the connection between obesity and cancer is one of the most established findings in cancer epidemiology. Excess body fat does more than add weight to the body. The tissue is biologically active, producing hormones and inflammatory molecules that can influence how cells — including tumors — grow, divide and repair themselves. Dr. Gilberto de Lima Lopes, Chief of Medical Oncology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami, said the cancer findings fit into a broader pattern. GLP-1s increasingly resemble “a really interesting longevity drug,” he said — one that may influence enough biological processes to extend life in ways researchers are only beginning to understand.
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“Multiomics and Artificial Intelligence for Precision Drug Discovery and Potential Clinical Applications." That’s the title for a study published in Nature about how the integration of multiomics technologies with AI has become a transformative force in modern precision medicine, particularly within drug discovery. The authors say “Multiomics approaches, including genome-wide association studies, transcriptomic profiling, proteomic interaction mapping, and metabolomic sequencing, provide unparalleled insights into the molecular dynamics of disease pathogenesis. Advanced AI methodologies, which leverage deep learning architectures, exhibit extraordinary capabilities in deciphering these intricate biological datasets, elucidating latent patterns, and constructing high-fidelity predictive models. The combined application of multiomics and AI has significant potential to accelerate target identification, streamline lead optimization processes, and enhance the precision of clinical trial designs.”
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“Early Research Suggests a Path to Predict and Prevent Lung Cancer.” That’s the headline for a New York Times article about scientists identifying proteins that could signal increased lung cancer risk, as well as a drug that could reduce the odds of a tumor developing. The article reports that a team of more than 80 researchers working across four continents have identified a set of proteins in the blood that accurately predict lung cancers more than five years before diagnosis. The scientists also found early evidence that an existing anti-inflammatory drug could significantly reduce lung cancer risk in people with elevated concentrations of these proteins, which they linked to inflammation. While more research lies ahead, outside experts said the findings, which were published in the journal Cell, offer a promising starting point toward a long-held public health goal. “Preventing lung cancer has been a missing holy grail for a very, very long time,” said Dr. Douglas Arenberg, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study. The authors may have identified a biological marker that “not only predicts risk but also predicts the probability of benefit from a given drug” for prevention, he said.
“Zuckerberg's Philanthropic Venture Unveils AI World Model for Drug Discovery.” Reuters carries that headline about the launch of Biohub, a philanthropic venture of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, that provides a world model of protein biology to accelerate drug discovery. Biohub said its world model is built on the fourth generation of evolutionary scale modeling, or ESM, which learns from the protein sequences produced by evolution and uses that knowledge to understand protein biology. We've verified the model's ability and validated many of its predictions in both immune diseases and cancer cases ... It is very promising. We are hopeful that once these models are released, others will quickly adopt them to tackle some of the problems that they see in the lab" Chan told Reuters.
Barry A. Bunin, PhD, is the Founder & CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, which provides a modern approach to drug discovery research informatics trusted globally by thousands of leading researchers. The CDD Vault is a hosted biological and chemical database that securely manages your private and external data.