Plus: Longevity drugs for drugs–and maybe people |
In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the shooting at the CDC, longevity drugs for dogs (and maybe eventually people too), Strand Therapeutics’ programmable mRNA for fighting cancer, Tahoe Therapeutics’ AI models of living cells, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
On Friday evening, a 30-year-old man who believed the COVID-19 vaccine had made him ill fired hundreds of bullets on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters. A DeKalb County police officer was killed in the attack.
The shooting followed years of conspiracy theories and misinformation about vaccines. Christa Capazzola, the CDC’s acting chief operating officer, called the shooting “a targeted attack on CDC related to COVID” in a Saturday email addressed to the agency’s employees. A union representing CDC workers called on federal officials to condemn misinformation about vaccines. Attacks on science have increased since President Trump took office in January, and his HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has sought to blame the CDC for the pandemic. In 2021, he falsely called the COVID shots the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Then, last week, the Trump Administration canceled almost $500 million in contracts to develop mRNA vaccines that could protect against future infectious disease outbreaks or pandemics to the horror of public health experts. On Saturday, the day after the shooting, National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to claim that the public didn’t trust mRNA technology—without commenting on the role he or his boss played in that. On a call with the staff of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, CDC employees recounted harrowing experiences during the shooting and asked about the misinformation that may have influenced the shooter, according to reporting by Stat. One employee, struggling to hold back tears, said that she had been sheltering in place during the attack and didn’t feel safe until she saw the SWAT team. “So I think it would be helpful to know what went right so that we feel like we weren’t just sitting ducks,” she said. |
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 | | Loyal's Celine Halioua Ethan Pines for Forbes |
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| Dogs don’t live long enough. Celine Halioua – an Oxford Ph.D. dropout and former chief of staff at the first venture capital fund focused on longevity-related biotechs – thinks they deserve a few more years. She’s spent the last nearly six years building Loyal, a San Francisco startup developing drugs to delay canine aging by targeting metabolic and hormonal imbalances before they become disease. The company’s first beef-flavored longevity pill could hit the market by 2026, potentially extending dogs’ lives–and perhaps someday ours as well. “I realized that to do this in humans would take billions of dollars, patent issues and trauma, but you could do it in dogs,” says Halioua, 30, whose own dog, Della, is a senior Rottweiler mix that she adopted three years ago. Loyal doesn’t have any revenue yet, but Halioua is in conversations with the FDA and has cleared early hurdles. Under the agency’s conditional approval program for innovative veterinary drugs, Halioua hopes to get the okay to be on the market with its first drug, which changes the metabolism of senior dogs (ages 10 and up) to mimic a low-calorie diet, which has been shown to extend their lives, next year. Loyal also has both a shot and a pill in the works to lengthen large dogs’ short lifespans by limiting a growth hormone more prevalent in big dogs than small. Halioua has raised $135 million equity from top investors that include Bain Capital, First Round, Khosla Ventures and Valor Equity Partners at a valuation of $425 million. The market is potentially enormous: There are nearly 90 million dogs across some 60 million households in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. Last year those households spent an average of $1,852 on their pups, a 6% increase over 2023. Loyal’s drugs have the potential to quickly generate hundreds of millions in revenue, should they get the regulatory nod. Beyond that, Loyal hopes that its success with dogs will someday open an even bigger market: people. That’s a herculean task given the cost and time it might take to develop a human longevity drug and get it approved. But Halioua thinks the science will ultimately win out. “I think the general public will be blown away when they realize they can go to the vet and get a drug to extend their dogs’ lifespan,” she says. “Then they’ll get like, ‘Why can’t I do this for my grandma?’” Read more here. |
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| Strand Therapeutics raised $153 million led by Swedish investment giant Kinnevik to make cancerous tumors light up, making them reveal themselves to the body’s immune system. The deal, at an estimated $550 million valuation, followed early clinical results showing its programmable mRNA shrank patients’ tumors who were out of other treatment options. “It shocked even us,” Strand cofounder and CEO Jake Becraft told Forbes. Read the whole story here. |
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| One of the holy grails of biology is digitally simulating a living cell. If researchers can use computers to more accurately understand how new medicines would react in the body, that could give them greater confidence when they’re tested on animals and humans. But the missing piece of making this a reality is data. Tahoe Therapeutics got one step closer to that goal with the February release of Tahoe-100M, a collection of 100 million different datapoints showing how different kinds of cancer cells responded to interactions with more than 1,000 different molecules. This type of data is crucial to training AI models, because information on how cells respond to various molecules improves an algorithm’s ability to predict how they’ll be affected by others. This week, Tahoe announced $30 million in new venture funding, led by Amplify Partners, bringing the company’s total funding to $42 million and its valuation to $120 million. “Our core superpower is the ability to generate the massive datasets required for virtual cell models,” CEO Nima Alidoust told Forbes. Read the whole story here. |
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| PUBLIC HEALTH + HOSPITALS |
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| Annals of Internal Medicine published a large-scale study of more than 1.2 million children over the course of 23 years to determine if aluminum in vaccines is related to any chronic disorders in July. The study found no evidence of such a link, highlighting both the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines. HHS Secretary Kennedy critiqued the study’s methodology and demanded its retraction, something that the journal refused to do. The publication Unbiased Science, written by public health scientists, has an excellent breakdown of the study and explains why Kennedy’s critique is flawed. Plus: A preliminary study suggests that bird flu (H5N1) may be airborne on dairy farms. |
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| NEXT BILLION-DOLLAR STARTUPS |
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| Twenty of the 25 companies on this year’s Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list of VC-backed startups we think most likely to become worth $1 billion or more are focused on artificial intelligence. Three of them–Collate, Assort Health and AcuityMD–use AI to improve operations in healthcare. Assort Health sells a text-to-voice artificial intelligence chatbot to search physicians’ calendars to match their openings with the type of appointment required, cutting wait times on millions of inbound calls to medical groups. Acuity MD uses AI to sift through de-identified records, helping medical device manufacturers connect to physicians whose patients might benefit from different products. And Collate, which came out of stealth in January, uses AI to automate the paperwork required for life sciences companies, such as that for clinical trials and FDA approval. “This stuff they would have spent months doing we can do over the course of days,” says cofounder and CEO Surbhi Sarna. See the full 2025 list here. |
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| Trump delayed a change on Medicare’s coverage of pricey bandages after a health company that makes them donated millions to political action committee MAGA, Inc. As GLP-1 drugs shrink appetites, some restaurants are offering miniature meals and tiny tasting menus. Eli Lilly’s much-anticipated obesity pill, called orforglipron, fell short of Zepbound and Wegovy, leading to 11% weight loss in a late-stage clinical trial. The company’s stock plummeted on the news and hadn’t recovered as of Tuesday’s market close. Why Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner also puts crucial health data at risk. A new study published this week found encouraging early results for a cancer vaccine in patients with pancreatic and colorectal cancer, two indications that are difficult to treat. AbbVie plans to spend $195 million on a facility to manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients at its campus north of Chicago. The FDA approved Boehringer Ingelheim’s zongertinib, an oral lung cancer treatment for patients with HER2 mutations. |
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