Prometheus raises $12 billion in capital for artificial engineers

The Jeff Bezos-backed AI startup Prometheus has raised another $12 billion in funding, saying it’s building an "artificial general engineer" to accelerate the design of physical products. The startup is led by Bezos and former Verily executive Vik Bajaj, who is also a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Prometheus is building AI models for physical tasks, including engineering, manufacturing and drug design, CNBC writes. Though it’s not disclosing initial products, it’s recruiting talent from companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Nvidia.

Veteran investor Bob Nelson spoke of Prometheus in January during a live taping of the Readout LOUD at the J.P. Morgan conference.

“In general, the people in biotech are overestimating the impact of AI in the very short term — I would say six months, 12 months — and underestimating the impact of AI in the long term, because it could potentially eliminate full swaths of pharma once it becomes systematized,” Nelson said at the time. “But, it’s the hardest place to do AI, of all places.”

cancer

Nonprofit steps up to rescue orphan drug

In an unusual move, Blood Cancer United announced it has acquired the remaining supply of Luvelta, an experimental cancer drug abandoned by developer Sutro Biopharma last year. It’ll also inherit the drug’s regulatory designation and compassionate-use program, STAT’s Lauren Chan writes.

The nonprofit plans to provide the medication free of charge to children with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia who may benefit from it. This highlights a recurring challenge in rare disease drug development: promising therapies can disappear when commercial prospects dry up.

“This is just a terrific model for pediatric cancer drug development because the drug has been de-risked and so much has been invested in the drug in terms of research and development,” said Nancy Goodman, patient advocate and founder of Kids v Cancer. “I hope this is a model we can replicate.”

glp-1 drugs

Lilly, Nvidia invest in health care AI company

Abridge, which started out developing AI scribes, unveiled new partnerships with Eli Lilly and chipmaker Nvidia, STAT’s Mario Aguilar writes. It’ll work with Nvidia to build a system for clinical conversations, saying generic AI models don’t have enough domain expertise in health care. CEO Shiv Rao said there’s growing interest from biopharma companies to use the technology for tasks such as clinical trial recruitment.

“We are very much now pursuing and having any number of meetings with all the different biopharma around opportunities like clinical trial recruitment,” Rao said. “Our hope is that we can be really strategic there, but we’ll hopefully have more to announce on that front of these coming months.”

podcast

An obesity drug deep-dive, and peptides move mainstream

Can any of the new obesity medications in development stand out from the pack? Which company just broke records with its IPO? And will the Food and Drug Administration allow greater access to experimental peptides?

We discuss all that and more on this week’s episode of “The Readout LOUD,” STAT’s biotech podcast.

Undark’s Sara Talpos joins the podcast to discuss her reporting on the peptide BPC-157, and how it’s jumped from a Croatian lab to bodybuilding forums on Reddit to the FDA. (STAT co-published Talpos’ articles; the second piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center). We also discuss the latest life sciences news, including obesity data from the American Diabetes Association meeting and a record-breaking IPO.

Listen here.

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