Drug shortages have surged to their highest levels in decades. In early 2024, U.S. pharmacies reported more than 323 active shortages, spanning essential generics, injectables, and even critical cancer therapies. These numbers echo findings from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which tracks persistent disruptions that ripple through hospitals, pharmacies, and ultimately to patients in urgent need of care.
While the pandemic made those cracks impossible to ignore, the reality
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Life Sciences | News, Analysis, Insights - HIT Consultant
Why MBX Capital is Betting $100M on the Link Between Industrial Toxins and Chronic Disease
What You Should Know:
- MBX Capital has secured over $100M in capital commitments to invest in early-stage biotech and health tech companies, specifically focusing on "deep health" solutions that address diseases linked to environmental toxins and synthetic exposures.
- Backed by institutional heavyweights like Industry Ventures and the State of New York, the firm plans to deploy checks ranging from $1 million to $4 million into startups that move beyond symptom management
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Mass General Brigham Spins Out AIwithCare: New AI Tool Doubles Clinical Trial Enrollment Rates
What You Should Know:
- Mass General Brigham is announcing the spinout of AIwithCare, a company founded by researchers from the health system who developed an artificial intelligence (AI) screening tool that significantly outperformed manual screening for determining a patient’s eligibility and enrolling them in a clinical trial.
- The tool, RECTIFIER (RAG-Enabled Clinical Trial Infrastructure for Inclusion Exclusion Review), was first developed and studied by
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OpenAI-Backed Chai Discovery Raises $130M to Tackle “Undruggable” Targets with Generative AI
What You Should Know:
- Chai Discovery has secured a $130M Series B financing round, propelling its valuation to $1.3 billion just months after emerging from stealth.
- Co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, the funding validates Chai’s proprietary AI models, which can predict biochemical interactions and design drugs for targets previously considered "undruggable."
- With backing from industry heavyweights like OpenAI and Thrive Capital, Chai is positioning itself
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Mount Sinai’s AI Tool “V2P” Predicts Disease Type from Genetic Mutations
What You Should Know:
- Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed a new artificial intelligence tool called V2P (Variant to Phenotype) that identifies not only disease-causing genetic mutations but also predicts the specific diseases they may trigger.
- Published in Nature Communications, this machine learning model improves diagnostic speed and accuracy by linking genetic variants to phenotypic outcomes, moving beyond simple "harmful vs. benign"
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Lunit and Daiichi Sankyo Partner to Accelerate Cancer Biomarker Discovery with AI
What You Should Know:
- Lunit has announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Daiichi Sankyo to integrate its AI-powered Lunit SCOPE digital pathology products into two of Daiichi Sankyo's oncology pipeline programs.
- The partnership will utilize Lunit's SCOPE uIHC and SCOPE IO solutions to analyze pathology slides for quantitative data and immune phenotyping, aiming to discover novel biomarkers and improve patient stratification for clinical trials. This move underscores
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Valinor Raises $13M to Predict Clinical Trial Outcomes Using Multi-Omic AI
What You Should Know:
- Valinor has launched with $13M in seed funding to tackle one of the pharmaceutical industry's most expensive challenges: clinical trial failure led by CRV and Harpoon Ventures.
- The company uses proprietary AI models trained on matched multi-omic samples and clinical outcomes to predict how specific patient populations will respond to new therapies. This "response-first" approach aims to drastically de-risk drug development by identifying responders
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Accenture Invests in Ryght AI to Accelerate Clinical Trials with Agentic AI and Digital Twins
What You Should Know:
- Accenture has made a strategic investment in Ryght AI through its venture capital arm, aiming to modernize the sluggish clinical trial process. Ryght AI utilizes "agentic AI" and its proprietary AI Site Twin platform to create dynamic digital replicas of research sites, allowing pharmaceutical companies to optimize site selection and patient enrollment.
- The strategic collaboration seeks to remove the manual bottlenecks that delay life-saving therapies,
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The Future of Pharma Marketing: How AI and Real-World Data Are Redefining Personalization
Consumers are increasingly learning about potential drug therapies from advertising across the media channels they use regularly – whether it be broadcast or streaming TV, social media, display ads, or streaming radio. One survey found that 63% of patients learned about new treatments through pharmaceutical ads, but capturing and retaining consumer attention continues to be an uphill battle for pharmaceutical marketers, with many consumers experiencing advertising saturation and fatigue. Life
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AstraZeneca Selects Salesforce Agentforce Life Sciences to Deploy AI-Powered Global Customer Engagement
What You Should Know:
- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the world’s #1 CRM, today announced that AstraZeneca (LSE/STO/Nasdaq: AZN), a global, science-led biopharmaceutical company, has selected Agentforce Life Sciences for Customer Engagement to help transform its customer engagement globally, fostering stronger relationships with healthcare professionals (HCPs) through data-driven, AI-powered engagement.
- This work will support AstraZeneca’s commitment to push the boundaries of science to
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