New post from Anthropic on what they've been up to in biopharma. Some interesting projects
Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude anthropic.com/research/early…
Rob Shaffer retweeted
Poll for biotech entrepreneurs and biotech/pharma BD folks:
What do you use for your fundraising or BD tracker?
I personally use excel, which I kind of hate.
If you use software or SaaS, please reply with the name. Thanks!
45%Excel or Google Sheets
12%Software or SaaS app
43%Show me the answers
126 votes • Final results Rob Shaffer retweeted
IMO… it is a mistake to “try to increase U.S. competitiveness through protectionism.” The new rule “may make it easier for non-U.S. companies to succeed through manufacturing in China. This wouldn’t help our global competitiveness.”
IMO… let’s instead kick ass with American ingenuity!
biocentury.com/article/66129…
Buyout firm EQT to acquire Qiagen for $10.8 billion reuters.com/legal/transactio…
Love the idea of modular fill/finish facilities/pods -
Mark Cuban wants to crack open the market for rare disease treatments
statnews.com/2026/10/21/mark…
Go Wayne!
Estuary Biotherapeutics is on a mission to make #ADPKD history through targeted gene therapies designed to address the disease’s underlying genetic cause.
Led by CEO Wayne Sackett and built on landmark discoveries from scientific co-founders Stefan Somlo, MD, and Michael Caplan, MD, PhD, at @YaleMed, we're launching with $103 million to advance our lead programs, EST-201 and EST-101, toward clinical proof of concept.
Watch our story and learn more at estuarybio.com.
estuarybio.com/news/estuary-…
Very much yes @JakeAuch
Mass. lawmaker Auchincloss favors boosting U.S. biotech over targeting China statnews.com/2026/10/15/auch…
Cardiomyopathy space continues to pick up steam. Souffle yesterday, AZ today, more to come!
$AZ. Insitro. $1.46 billion in biobucks.
MASH and cardiommyopathy.
astrazeneca.com/media-centre…
Another big raise for a pair of VC funds. Congrats to Orbimed
OrbiMed Raises $3 Billion Across Global and Asia Private Equity Funds orbimed.com/orbimed-raises-3…
Rob Shaffer retweeted
This is a meaningful step to bring better coordination around FDA initiatives to make the process for developing treatments for rare diseases more efficient. Will help accelerate new policy development.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Impressive round and syndicate for a preclinical company. Interesting - 2nd program still targeting PLN but going after HFrEF now (vs R14del DCM)
Souffle Therapeutics Announces Oversubscribed $135 Million Series B Financing to Advance Lead Clinical Programs and Continued Pipeline Progress souffletx.com/news/press-rel…
This is good -
50 years ago, my colleagues and I pursued basic research science that became revolutionary statnews.com/2026/10/09/robe…
In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a promising therapy is available to a fortunate few
statnews.com/2026/10/07/musc…
Forbion raises €2.3 billion across two new funds
forbion.com/news-insights/ne…
Rob Shaffer retweeted
As a father to three children under seven, protecting our streets and schools from violent crime is top of mind. That means saying no to dangerous ideas, regardless of politics. In 2026, the No on Question 9 campaign wants to get rid of sensible gun safety laws.
On Nov. 3, join me in voting Yes on Question 9, Yes for civil rights, and Yes for public safety.
Opinion | Voting Yes on Question 9 will uphold the State House’s 2024 Act Modernizing Firearms Laws. This law protects police and helps them solve crimes. bostonherald.com/2026/10/04/…
Rob Shaffer retweeted
Gaza Ministry of Health has now released mortality numbers for 2025. For the first time since the war, they give numbers for all deaths, including natural deaths.
In 2025 there were a total of 24,650 deaths in Gaza. 18,870 (76.6%) of these were violent, of which 17,286 (70.1%) were due to "war operations" and 1,584 (6.4%) were classified as accidents. There were a total of 5,780 (23.4%) non-violent deaths, including disease, old age, and all other causes.
5,780 deaths is about the same as the annual non-violent mortality in Gaza before the war, and the age distribution is similar to 2022. There is no significant excess of non-violent deaths.
In other words, despite frequent and loud claims to the contrary, there seems to be very few indirect deaths due to the war in Gaza in 2025.
As there were 50,227 births in 2025, this gives a natural population growth of 25,577 or 1.2% in Gaza in 2025, which is higher population growth than most countries in the world and more than the world average.
There are currently ~6,000 births/month in Gaza, per GMH. Assuming a similar number of non-violent deaths in Gaza in 2026 as in 2025, that means there are currently 12x more births than deaths in Gaza, and that Gaza is now experiencing one of the highest population growths in the world.
Quite late to this post but I'd highly recommend it.
I don't work in the computational design space anymore, but it's still fascinating to me as it could unlock completely new mAbs/binders and/or previously-intractable therapeutic targets. My undergrad research was in computational protein design, through the lens of biosensors: we'd design a leave-one-out GFP barrel that would fluoresce in the presence of whatever peptide you were trying to detect (it would complete the barrel and enable fluorescence). This was ~15 years ago and now feels like the dark ages, ha.
The antibody revolution is real. The business, less so.
couteiral.substack.com/p/the…
"84% of respondents underestimated [commercial] launch success" for rare disease drugs as a class.
Rare disease benchmarks: Investment professionals’ accuracy and beliefs
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
I finally had some time to work some more on my COGS estimator at biologics.tools/. I've added a few things that I think will be helpful:
1. You can now log in with your own user/pw
2. You can now save scenarios for revisiting later (this is why I added a log in)
3. You can now export your results as a CSV, not just PDF or JSON
Please feel free to try these new features out (not behind a paywall) and let me know what you think. Soon, I'll add the ability to do multi-scenario comparisons, and then later I'll add Monte Carlo simulations


















