October 15, 2025
Barry Bunin, PhD
Founder & CEO
Collaborative Drug Discovery
“Nobel Prizes This Year Offer Three Cheers for Slow Science” That’s the headline for an article in The New York Times on how all three awards — granted each year in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry — honored achievements rooted in fundamental research from decades ago. The Times notes “Some experts interpret the selections by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as representing the importance of slow, basic science, work pursued out of a desire to better understand the world. In an age when government efficiency has been used to justify sharp cuts to scientific funding, the science Nobels offer a case for plodding curiosity: that esoteric, seemingly useless exploration can lay the bricks for a road to places we cannot yet see.”
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“AlphaFold 3: An Unprecedent Opportunity for Fundamental Research and Drug Development.” That’s the headline for a study published in Precision Clinical Medicine finding that “With unprecedented accuracy, the AF3 model may successfully predict the structure and interactions of virtually all biomolecules, including proteins, ligands, nucleic acids, ions, etc. By accurately simulating the structural information and interactions of biomacromolecules, it has shown great potential in many aspects of structural prediction, mechanism research, drug design, protein engineering, vaccine development, and precision therapy.” Noting that AlphaFold won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of the DeepMind team, the paper states, in part: “As the latest version of the AlphaFold series, AF3 not only inherits the outstanding performance of its predecessor AF2 in protein structure prediction, but also significantly expands its application scope through technological innovation, enabling it to accurately predict the complex structure of small molecules, nucleic acids, substrates, and other ligands.” The paper concludes: “With the continuous progress of technology and the continuous efforts of researchers, AF3 and its likely future versions may eventually evolve into a perfect tool and play an increasingly important role in every field and immensely benefit the human being.”
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“AI Generated its First Working Genome: A Tiny Bacteria Killer” That’s the headline for an article in Science News that begins: “Artificial intelligence can dash off more than routine emails. It has now written tiny working genomes.” Reporting on the study “Generative Design of Novel Bacteriophages with Genome Language Models,” published in bioRxiv, the article looks at how two AI models designed the blueprints for 16 viruses capable of attacking Escherichia coli in lab dishes. A mixture of these AI-generated bacteriophages stopped virus-resistant E. coli strains from growing, suggesting that the technique could help scientists design therapies capable of taking on tough-to-treat microbial infections. The article notes that the findings suggest that AI could help researchers develop viruses to use in phage therapy, a potential option to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. The article quotes Dr. Kimberly Davis, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who wasn’t involved in the work, as saying that when dealing with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, “The need to find a phage that targets the bacterial strain would be very urgent. Utilizing AI could be a powerful way of rapidly generating a phage match to treat patients.”
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“NVIDIA and United Kingdom Build Nation’s AI Infrastructure and Ecosystem to Fuel Innovation, Economic Growth and Jobs.” That’s the headline for a recent release from NVIDIA about the company’s investing in accelerating the AI industrial revolution in the United Kingdom, working with partners including CoreWeave, Microsoft and Nscale to build the nation’s next generation of AI infrastructure. By the end of 2026, the companies will build and operate AI factories that will serve leading AI models, including those from OpenAI, to enable the U.K.’s sovereign AI goals for building a platform to power innovation, growth and opportunity across the economy. The release notes that many U.K.-based life sciences companies are using NVIDIA technologies to take an AI-first approach to drug discovery, simulating therapies and drug design to achieve faster treatment testing. NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said “We are at the big bang of intelligence, and the United Kingdom’s Goldilocks ecosystem of world-class expertise, outstanding universities and vibrant industries is uniquely positioned to thrive in the age of AI. With AI supercomputers powering state-of-the-art models locally, a new generation of U.K. researchers, developers and entrepreneurs will drive discovery and build the companies of tomorrow.”
“AI Engineers Nanoparticles for Improved Drug Delivery” Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering carries that headline about biomedical engineers at Duke who have developed a platform that combines automated wet lab techniques with artificial intelligence to design nanoparticles for drug delivery. The approach could help researchers deliver difficult-to-encapsulate therapeutics more efficiently and effectively. The article says in a proof of concept, the team used the platform to create nanoparticles capable of delivering a difficult-to-encapsulate therapy for leukemia and optimized the design of a second anti-cancer nanoparticle. “AI can help us identify promising delivery molecules, but if you don’t mix them with the drug at a certain ratio, they won’t form a stable nanoparticle,” said Dr. Daniel Reke, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke. “If we can identify the optimal mixture ratios, then we can form the particles and maintain their stability.”
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.