Near­ly two years ago, Iso­mor­phic Labs dropped Al­phaFold 3, the lat­est gen­er­a­tion of its No­bel Prize-win­ning, struc­ture-pre­dict­ing AI mod­el.

Now the com­pa­ny claims it has an­oth­er ma­jor ad­vance on its hands. While it has­n't re­leased ex­ten­sive de­tails, Tues­day's news could put Iso­mor­phic sig­nif­i­cant­ly ahead of the ri­val star­tups and re­searchers who have built their own clones and ad­vance­ments on Al­phaFold 3 in re­cent years.

In a blog post and tech­ni­cal pa­per, the Lon­don-based start­up de­tailed the per­for­mance of what it calls the Iso­mor­phic Labs Drug De­sign En­gine, or IsoDDE. De­spite the clunky name, the com­pa­ny claims it has more than dou­bled the suc­cess rate for ac­cu­rate­ly pre­dict­ing pro­tein-drug and an­ti­body-anti­gen struc­tures, com­pared with Al­phaFold 3.

The com­pa­ny called the new en­gine a "step-change im­prove­ment" over Al­phaFold 3.

It isn’t all doom and gloom in the vac­cine in­dus­try.

IL­i­AD Biotech­nolo­gies an­nounced a $115 mil­lion over­sub­scribed Se­ries B on Tues­day — enough mon­ey to start ac­cru­ing piv­otal Phase 3 da­ta of the com­pa­ny’s in­tranasal whoop­ing cough vac­cine. The pri­vate round is the largest for a vac­cine mak­er in more than two years, ac­cord­ing to da­ta com­piled by End­points News.

The fundraise comes at a pre­car­i­ous time for vac­cine-mak­ers in the US, as the cur­rent ad­min­is­tra­tion led by HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has wa­tered down or out­right backed off rec­om­mend­ing cer­tain vac­cines in the last year. The reg­u­la­to­ry bar for ap­proval has risen at the FDA as well.

The Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health has halt­ed an arm of a large tri­al in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether J&J and Bay­er's blood thin­ner Xarel­to is su­pe­ri­or to the stan­dard of care for low­er­ing the rate of stroke or vas­cu­lar death over one year.

NIH said Tues­day that the halt was due to safe­ty con­cerns. It said the study found low-dose Xarel­to to be "un­safe and in­ef­fec­tive com­pared to stan­dard of care," which is Sanofi and Bris­tol My­ers Squib­b's Plav­ix. The de­ci­sion fol­lowed a reg­u­lar re­view by the study's Da­ta Safe­ty and Mon­i­tor­ing Board, ac­cord­ing to NIH.

The study, known as CAP­TI­VA, is eval­u­at­ing more than 1,600 par­tic­i­pants across three arms in a dou­ble-blind ran­dom­ized tri­al. It's test­ing whether Xarel­to plus as­pirin, As­traZeneca's Bril­in­ta plus as­pirin, or both are bet­ter than Plav­ix plus as­pirin to pre­vent a stroke or death in pa­tients with nar­rowed brain ar­ter­ies.

A US ap­peals court up­held a Louisiana law reg­u­lat­ing how 340B-dis­count­ed drugs are dis­trib­uted to pa­tients, deal­ing an­oth­er set­back to the phar­ma in­dus­try as drug­mak­ers con­tin­ue fight­ing state reg­u­la­tion of the fed­er­al pro­gram.

In its Mon­day de­ci­sion, a pan­el on the Fifth Cir­cuit cit­ed an­oth­er re­cent case in which the same court sided with Mis­sis­sip­pi and its “vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal” state law. “We need not rein­vent the wheel,” the court said.

Un­der the 340B pro­gram, drug­mak­ers are re­quired to of­fer dis­counts to cer­tain health or­ga­ni­za­tions serv­ing low-in­come pa­tients. Some drug­mak­ers have sought to lim­it the num­ber of third-par­ty, con­tract phar­ma­cies they sup­ply dis­count­ed drugs to. In re­sponse, more than a dozen states en­act­ed a patch­work of laws to curb such prac­tices.