13 January 2026   Edinburgh-based CRO Axol Bioscience  announces  it has raised $2.8M in funding led by US life sciences specialist BroadOak Capital Partners. This investment will build upon Axol's double-digit revenue growth in 2025 to further support the development of its human-based in vitro disease models and its expansion to the US market.   "We’re proud to partner with BroadOak, a global leader in life sciences investing. Their expertise and support, alongside our long

09 December 2025   Riccardo Levato’s team at UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University receives  an ERC Consolidator Grant of approx. €2.3M to advance the next phase of its innovative method of generative, context-aware 3D bioprinting.     The technique of 3D bioprinting of living tissues to recapitulate the structure and function of human organs has shown great promise in disease modelling, drug testing and regenerative medicine. Supported by a 2020 ERC Starting Grant, Riccardo Lev

17 October 2025   Hesperos Inc. has been awarded  a Phase IIB SBIR grant from the National Institute on Aging to investigate the effects of medication on cognitive impairment.   In humans, drug-induced cognitive decline may arise from subtle network‑level disruption, synaptic dysfunction, neurotransmitter imbalance and moderate neuroinflammation. However, these effects are very challenging to detect using standard in vitro models and animal testing. Cognitive decline is typic

16 September 2025   Franco-American CRO Genoskin  announces it has raised  $8.7M in its first funding round led by OCCTE (FPCI Occidev Impacts) to grow its human ex vivo skin platform.   In a field that struggles to bridge the gap between preclinical promise and clinical outcome, the project carried by Genoskin has a particular significance. The development of vaccines and therapies for human skin diseases is fraught with difficulties, not least of which is the existence of n

25 September 2025   Cedars-Sinai Medical Center based in Los Angeles has been awarded $5M by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) to develop a human-based AI-driven KronosRx platform  for improved prediction of adverse drug effects.   The ARPA-H Computational ADME-Tox and Physiology Analysis for Safer Therapeutics ( CATALYST ) program aims to revolutionize preclinical drug safety prediction by facilitating the development of next gen in vitro and in silico mo

12 June 2025   Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Parallel Bio announces  it has raised $21 million Series A funding to scale up and automate the production of its immune organoid in vitro platform. This funding round led by AIX Ventures was supported by prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.   Beyond infections and autoimmune diseases, it is widely recognized that the human immune systems plays a key role in a great number of

30 June 2025   The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan has granted orphan drug designation to riliprubart for treating chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), Sanofi reports . Riliprubart also holds this designation for CIDP in the EU and US.   By engineering a human-relevant chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy-on-chip as a preclinical tool for disease modelling and drug efficacy testing, Hesperos has played an instrumental role in

27 October 2025   As we enter a new era of drug discovery, where IND authorization can now be granted based on human data only, marking a clean departure from mandatory animal testing, Qureator's human organ-on-chip platform has laid the groundwork for the world’s first IND approval of its kind .   The IND grant concerns SillaJen's BAL0891-tislelizumab combination therapy to treat solid tumors. Qureator's patient-derived vascularized tumor immune microenvironment (TME) model

16 December 2025   Put in place to accelerate the development of innovative cancer therapies through collaboration initiatives, the Netherlands-based Oncode Accelerator program announces launching of its Demonstrator Project. Through this project, researchers and drug developers will be able to share expertise, experimental platforms, and infrastructure to advance novel therapeutic approaches.   Recent advances in cancer therapies and in particular immunotherapy have produce

26 September 2025   Inductive Bio , an AI drug discovery partner developing virtual chemistry labs, is awarded up to $21M by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H)  to develop AI-powered human-relevant drug toxicity prediction models. ARPA-H Computational ADME-Tox and Physiology Analysis for Safer Therapeutics  (CATALYST) program aims to revolutionize preclinical drug safety prediction by leveraging human-based models that assess safety of drug candidates more