When Siren Biotech­nol­o­gy CEO Nicole Paulk learned last month that top FDA of­fi­cial Pe­ter Marks had re­signed, she be­gan look­ing out­side the US for a place to host a planned clin­i­cal tri­al.

The US has tra­di­tion­al­ly at­tract­ed drug stud­ies with its ro­bust in­fra­struc­ture, di­verse pa­tient pop­u­la­tion and a smoother reg­u­la­to­ry path to the world’s largest phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal mar­ket. But grow­ing un­cer­tain­ty over the FDA’s time­lines and ap­proval process­es ap­pears to be ac­cel­er­at­ing an ex­ist­ing par­a­digm: US drug­mak­ers test­ing their drugs abroad.

That fol­lows the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion's cuts to the FDA and the de­par­ture of high-pro­file of­fi­cials like Marks, who cit­ed vac­cine mis­in­for­ma­tion pro­mot­ed by HHS Sec­re­tary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his res­ig­na­tion let­ter. Al­though best known for reg­u­lat­ing vac­cines, Marks al­so over­saw the re­view of cell and gene ther­a­pies.

Kro­nos Bio, the drug de­vel­op­er long led by Gilead vet­er­an Nor­bert Bischof­berg­er, is call­ing it quits.

The biotech said Thurs­day it's sell­ing to Tang Cap­i­tal's shell com­pa­ny Con­cen­tra Bio­sciences for 57 cents per share KRON.

Kro­nos' stock closed Wednes­day's trad­ing at 89 cents apiece. The com­pa­ny's share­hold­ers could get ad­di­tion­al pay­ments if cer­tain pipeline as­sets are sold off be­fore the merg­er clos­es or in the com­ing years, and if oth­er cost sav­ings oc­cur.

Bischof­berg­er de­part­ed Kro­nos in No­vem­ber, a few weeks af­ter the biotech sought al­ter­na­tives for its fu­ture and slashed 83% of its work­force, adding to pri­or rounds of lay­offs.

For Con­cen­tra, it marks the sec­ond month in a row in which Kevin Tang's hedge fund has se­cured a win. Con­cen­tra an­nounced an agree­ment in April to buy Al­lakos, its first green light for a deal since late 2023.

Open source does­n't nec­es­sar­i­ly mean easy ac­cess, and now the non­prof­it Fu­ture House is try­ing to bridge that gap for AI tools in sci­ence by launch­ing a new plat­form.

On Thurs­day, Fu­ture House de­buted its plat­form, giv­ing free ac­cess to four AI agents de­signed for sci­en­tif­ic tasks. The or­ga­ni­za­tion is loose­ly mim­ic­k­ing Ope­nAI's play­book mak­ing Chat­G­PT free and easy to use to at­tract new users. Fu­ture House CEO Sam Ro­driques said he's ex­tend­ing an in­vi­ta­tion to all sci­en­tists, in­clud­ing those who may be skep­ti­cal that AI is more hype than help­ful when it comes to sci­ence.

"I'm a bi­ol­o­gist. The ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing a bi­ol­o­gist is that noth­ing works, so you be­come very skep­ti­cal," said Ro­driques, who ran an ap­plied biotech lab at the Fran­cis Crick In­sti­tute be­fore found­ing Fu­ture House in 2023. “Peo­ple have a skep­ti­cal gut re­ac­tion, and as a re­sult, the mod­els are un­der­ap­pre­ci­at­ed by the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty."