Biotech

Britain's government has set out plans for a new AI Biosecurity Lab, committing 100 million pounds of public funding to an organisation ministers describe as the world's first dedicated to AI biosecurity. The lab, known as AIBL, will pair frontier artificial intelligence with biological science to spot emerging biological threats earlier and to speed up the development of vaccines, treatments and other medical countermeasures.

Warp Sciences emerged from stealth on Thursday with 215 million dollars in funding and a plan to rebuild, in the United States, a piece of the drug discovery business that largely moved overseas: making and testing compounds. The round, led by Lightspeed, values the startup at 865 million dollars including the new money, according to the company's announcement.

China unveiled a draft plan on Friday, October 16, to restrict exports of 40 cutting-edge technologies spanning artificial intelligence, biomedicine and solar manufacturing. The proposal, titled Announcement No. 48, came jointly from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology, and it would place some of China's most valuable technical know-how under a formal export-control catalogue.