The New Biology Stack

The convergence of AI, automation, and advanced biology is collapsing the R&D timeline. The science has never moved faster. Now, the trick is getting all this out into the real world.

Written by: George Patin | Research Contributor, London Venture Capital Network

With biotech, there are two stories: the capital and the science. Writing this from 2026, it looks like the two are beginning to align on a takeoff trajectory.

The Big Picture

The pandemic was, by all accounts, a boon for bio. Venture funding peaked at $55.7 billion in 2021, contracting by roughly $18.5 billion into 2022 and bottoming in 2023. By 2025, though, VC funding came in at $33.8 billion across 1,171 deals — an accelerating recovery. Median deal value has also risen, to $26.6 million in 2025 from $19.9 million the year before: later rounds, higher concentration.

Pharma M&A is also at record highs, coming in at tens of billions in 2025 alone in anticipation of a series of patent expiries — majors refilling the pipeline. Increasingly, though, those pipelines are being refilled from one place in particular: China.

Cross-border out-licensing from Greater China biotechs surged nearly tenfold to a record $137.7 billion in 2025, up from $13.9 billion in 2021, across 186 deals (versus 65 the year before). Roughly a third of all global pharma licensing value in 2025 originated in China — and close to 90% of antibody-drug-conjugate licensing. Western buyers, squeezed by patent cliffs and pricing pressure, are sourcing assets that are cheaper upfront and faster through the clinic; AstraZeneca's tie-up with CSPC, Pfizer's $6 billion deal with 3SBio, and AbbVie's pact with RemeGen are the headline trades. The shift is structural.

The Science Coming Online

Where things really get interesting is the scientific research coming online.

First, there are the mRNA advances massively accelerated by pandemic-era vaccine development. By now, the technology has become a platform — or rather a novel delivery vector — reaching well beyond vaccines into oncology and the gene-editing toolkit. Then there is the impact of AI. Google DeepMind alone has built a stack of foundation biology models: AlphaFold, which predicts protein structure and earned Hassabis and Jumper the 2024 chemistry Nobel; AlphaMissense, which scores the effects of variants in protein-coding genes; and AlphaGenome, released in mid-2025, which extends prediction to the 98% of the genome that doesn't code for proteins and is already fielding on the order of a million API calls a day. They are no longer alone — the Arc Institute's open Evo2 and EvolutionaryScale's protein models, plus generative-design platforms like Xaira (which launched with over $1 billion behind David Baker's Nobel-winning protein-design work), round out an increasingly vertically integrated layer for molecular prediction and design.

Combined with advances in AI-driven drug discovery, what has emerged is a computational core underpinning the next generation of biology. Gene-editing, GLP-1s, and a whole crop of other technologies are opening up new directions on top of it.

It's worth looking at each in depth.

GLP-1s: The Revenue Engine

GLP-1s — Wegovy, Ozempic, orforglipron and others — have resulted in something of a revenue boom for pharma companies. Originally positioned as a treatment for diabetes, GLP-1s have quickly become mass-market for a host of other uses, primarily as a metabolic drug. The compounds themselves seem to have a whole slew of other positive side effects which we're only beginning to work out. As for the revenue growth, whether this will hold is an open question. For now, the market — roughly $53 billion in 2024, tracking toward $150 billion-plus by 2030 — is running at ~17.5% CAGR, and is directly responsible for much of major pharma's stock growth over the past couple of years. That, in turn, means more cash to be deployed into acquisitions and tech trials.

AI-Native Design and Discovery

AI-native design and discovery is another story, and potentially one of the hottest categories across all of bio. More than $11 billion flowed into AI/ML drug discovery in 2025 across hundreds of rounds, and Eli Lilly alone struck more than a dozen AI partnerships in the year. Insilico's lead candidate recently posted positive Phase IIa data in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis — the first molecule with both an AI-discovered target and an AI-designed compound to reach that stage. On the design side, generative-protein platforms — Xaira, Generate:Biomedicines, Isomorphic Labs — are now producing candidates rather than merely screening them. Still, the field is only beginning to take off; it will be a while before a drug sourced entirely through AI systems reaches market approval.

With the number of startups active in the space, however, it will likely become a major accelerant of biotech's growth as a sector, compressing R&D and time-to-market timelines. The moat? Translation. Companies that get the upstream stages — regulatory approval, scale-up, trials — right will be the ones with the biggest impact in the field.

Gene Editing Goes In Vivo

Casgevy proved the modality could be approved; the frontier now is delivery and personalisation. The 2023 approval was an ex vivo therapy — cells edited outside the body and reinfused — which is powerful but logistically challenging and expensive. The near-horizon shift is to in-vivo editing delivered directly to tissue, and ultimately to bespoke therapies designed on a per-patient basis.

In 2025, an infant known as Baby KJ became the first person treated with a personalised in-vivo base-editing therapy — a one-letter correction to a metabolic mutation, designed, manufactured and delivered in roughly six months, and later named among the year's defining scientific milestones. As with drug discovery, we have reached the proof-of-concept stage poised to eventually become a paradigm shift. The barriers are similar, with even more regulatory and ethical hurdles to overcome. The likely trajectory is limited deployments first for critical mutations, then a gradual fanning-out as the underlying technology builds a track record.

The European lens

Europe's biotech problem is no longer the science — it is the capital stack.

The continent produces world-class assets and increasingly owns the marquee names: London's Isomorphic Labs raised a $2.1 billion Series B in 2026 (after $600 million a year earlier), backed by Thrive Capital, Alphabet, GV, Temasek and the UK's Sovereign AI Fund. Germany's Tubulis closed a $361 million round in antibody-drug conjugates; Switzerland's Windward Bio, France's Owkin and BioNTech, and Belgium's VIB spin-out machine round out a credible cohort — not to mention the talent and research institutions underpinning much of this.

Yet the structural gap is stark: European scale-up capital runs roughly five times lower than in the US. The early science gets funded; the growth-stage rounds that turn a platform into a commercial company too often happen elsewhere. It's the same story as in many other sectors, perhaps just more stark here. Where the investment landscape is shifting is the seed-to-growth phases. Late-stage scale-up is still a challenge, and will likely remain so for some time.

The Investable Bio Stack

The key inflections are now converging. Biological foundation models and AI drug discovery-and-design systems in particular could prove a sector-level accelerant. Other technologies, such as mRNA and gene editing, are opening up new delivery vectors and treatments. The pieces increasingly stack: a computational core for prediction and design, sitting beneath a set of maturing delivery modalities, funded by the cash flow of the metabolic boom.

The big question for bio, then, is how quickly the traditional pipeline will adjust. Stringent ethical reviews and approvals exist in medicine for a reason. And yet, with potentially 5x more drug candidates and a massive clinical-trials backlog, it may be that the current wave of innovation runs into a critical bottleneck above it. The biggest unlock, then, may be in companies that optimise clinical trials, modernise hospital systems, and accelerate the process of regulatory filings and reviews.