A Molecular Clock.
A vice of his own making.
“It’s the first thing I read every day.” — Brigadier General (retired) Russ Howard, founding director of The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
1. The Stanford Emerging Technology Review (SETR) 2026 is intended to be a one-stop shopping primer that covers developments and implications in ten major emerging technology areas: artificial intelligence; biotechnology and synthetic biology; cryptography and computer security; energy technologies; materials science; neuroscience; quantum technologies; robotics; semiconductors; and space. The list is broad by design, and it includes fields that are widely regarded as pivotal to shaping society, economics, and geopolitics today and into the future. (Source: setr.stanford.edu. We’ll have more on the 2026 SETR in the next few days. Last year’s report was superb. We assume this one will be every bit as good. It’s 200 pages long.)
2. Isomorphic Labs:
Today, we are excited to share an update on our progress towards a new frontier of drug design. We have unlocked a new paradigm of predictive accuracy in understanding our biomolecular world, allowing us to rationally design new medicines on a computer with unprecedented understanding and precision.
We are giving a glimpse at a subset of the powerful and expansive capabilities of the Isomorphic Labs Drug Design Engine (IsoDDE), a unified computational drug-design system, progressing beyond AlphaFold 3 (AF3) in its predictive accuracy and introducing new capabilities which bridge the gap between structure prediction and real-world drug discovery.
We demonstrate that our IsoDDE more than doubles the accuracy of AlphaFold 3 on a challenging protein-ligand structure prediction generalization benchmark, predicts small molecule binding-affinities with accuracies that exceed gold-standard physics-based methods at a fraction of the time and cost, and is able to accurately identify novel binding pockets on target proteins using only the amino acid sequence as input.
IsoDDE offers a scalable foundation for AI drug design, providing the predictive fidelity required to navigate novel biological systems with unprecedented accuracy. (Sources: isomorphiclabs.com, blog.google. Isomorphic Labs is a Google DeepMind biopharmaceutical spin-off.)
3. A simple blood test might one day serve as a molecular ‘clock’ that predicts not only whether someone will develop Alzheimer’s disease — but when. The test, published in Nature Medicine yesterday, is based on an abnormal form of a protein called tau that circulates in the blood, and begins to accumulate in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s well before symptoms such as memory loss appear. If validated in larger studies, the test could provide a way to intervene in the neurodegenerative disease at an earlier stage, when treatment is more likely to be effective. It could also provide a measurable biological marker, or ‘biomarker’, to make clinical trials of potential Alzheimer’s disease treatments easier and cheaper. (Source: nature.com)
4. Some brain cells can resist the toxic processes associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Scientists have now identified the “cellular hazmat team“ that keeps neurons healthy. Neurodegenerative diseases like dementia are characterized by proteins that aggregate in the brain and kill neurons. Tau proteins are one of the main culprits, but they’re not always villains. In their functional state, they help to stabilize brain structures and facilitate nutrient transport. But misfolded tau proteins clump together, and a higher degree of clumping indicates more advanced neurodegenerative diseases. (Sources: sciencealert.com, ucsf.edu, news.mit.edu)
