Week 19 · May 5–11, 2026
The deals, papers, and market moves shaping AI drug discovery this week.
Deals & Partnerships
Licensing, collaborations, and pipeline milestones announced this week.
| Date | Companies | Type | Value | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 6 | Insilico Medicine / Qilu Pharmaceutical | Licensing | $120M | Exclusive Greater China rights to a preclinical USP1 inhibitor for oncology; upfront plus milestones and royalties. |
| May 7 | Recursion / Roche-Genentech | Collaboration | $150M | Expanded neuroscience deal using phenomics to prosecute three undisclosed CNS targets; upfront plus $2B biobucks. |
| May 9 | Relay Therapeutics | Milestone | Phase 3 | RLY-2608 (PI3Kα mutant-selective) enters pivotal Phase 3 in HR+/HER2− breast cancer; interim readout expected 1H 2027. |
Company Press Releases
127 releases parsed this week. Top signals below.
Media Coverage
How the financial and trade press framed the week.
Top 10 Papers of the Week
Ranked by scientific novelty, translational relevance, and peer signal.
Social Media Pulse
Signal from researchers, executives, and investors.
Stock Monitor
AI drug-discovery pure-plays, platform adjacents, and the pharma buyers. Prices as of market close Friday. Click any ticker for live data.
AI Drug Discovery Pure-Plays
| Company | Ticker | Exchange | Price | Weekly Δ | Market Cap | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Insilico Medicine | 03696.HK | HKEX | HK$42.60 | +4.2% | $4.8B | 12.4M |
| Recursion | RXRX | NASDAQ | $4.12 | −8.1% | $1.1B | 18.2M |
| Relay Therapeutics | RLAY | NASDAQ | $5.87 | +6.4% | $1.0B | 5.8M |
| Schrödinger | SDGR | NASDAQ | $21.34 | −3.2% | $1.6B | 2.1M |
| Tempus AI | TEM | NASDAQ | $58.90 | +2.1% | $9.8B | 8.6M |
| AbCellera | ABCL | NASDAQ | $3.21 | −1.8% | $960M | 3.4M |
| Absci | ABSI | NASDAQ | $3.04 | −4.6% | $380M | 1.2M |
| BenevolentAI | BAI.L | LSE | £0.42 | +1.2% | £90M | 0.3M |
| XtalPi / QuantumPharm | 02228.HK | HKEX | HK$6.88 | +3.7% | $2.1B | 8.9M |
| Evotec | EVT.DE | XETRA | €7.24 | −2.4% | €1.3B | 4.1M |
| Neumora Therapeutics | NMRA | NASDAQ | $8.44 | −2.8% | $1.2B | 1.8M |
| Structure Therapeutics | GPCR | NASDAQ | $32.10 | +5.1% | $1.8B | 1.4M |
Pharma AI Buyers & Enablers
| Company | Ticker | Exchange | Price | Weekly Δ | Market Cap | AI Relevance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eli Lilly | LLY | NYSE | $842.10 | +1.8% | $798B | Isomorphic, Insilico, Iambic |
| Bristol Myers Squibb | BMY | NYSE | $52.40 | −0.7% | $106B | Nimbus ($6.1B), Schrödinger |
| Novartis | NVS | NYSE | $114.20 | +0.9% | $232B | Isomorphic, Generate (acq.) |
| AstraZeneca | AZN | NASDAQ | $76.88 | +1.5% | $238B | BenevolentAI, internal AI |
| Roche | ROG.SW | SIX | CHF 284.60 | +2.8% | $240B | Recursion ($150M), Genentech |
| Pfizer | PFE | NYSE | $28.12 | −1.1% | $160B | Internal AI center |
| Amgen | AMGN | NASDAQ | $304.88 | +0.6% | $164B | deCODE Genetics ($14.3B) |
| Regeneron | REGN | NASDAQ | $742.30 | +2.4% | $80B | Genetics Center, 500K exomes |
| Merck & Co. | MRK | NYSE | $104.75 | −0.4% | $265B | Atomwise (acq.), internal |
| Gilead Sciences | GILD | NASDAQ | $86.40 | +0.3% | $108B | Insitro partnership |
| Sanofi | SNY | NASDAQ | $52.18 | +1.1% | $132B | Insilico ($1.2B), Atomwise, BioMap |
| NVIDIA | NVDA | NASDAQ | $924.50 | +3.2% | $2.3T | BioNeMo, Clara, GPU infra |
Prices are indicative Friday close. Click ticker for live quote. Weekly Δ = Monday open to Friday close. Market caps rounded. Data refreshed every Sunday for Monday publication.
Thought Leadership
Why 0-to-DC Data Is the New Moat in AI Drug Discovery
The hardest dataset to assemble in drug discovery is not genomic, chemical, or clinical — it is the longitudinal record of what a molecule actually did from target nomination through to development candidate. Every failed assay, every SAR iteration, every off-target surprise, every pharmacology tweak — that is the tacit knowledge AI models need to compress timelines, and it exists almost nowhere as training data.
Insilico's 30+ internal DCs (development candidates) are a flywheel because each program generates tens of thousands of paired observations: compound → assay → decision → next compound. This is the opposite of public datasets like ChEMBL, which capture terminal bioactivity without the decisions that got there. Ranked against scaling-law evidence (see this week's Paper #08), it is increasingly clear that curated decision data beats parameter count for real-world property prediction.
Platform-only companies face a structural gap here. You cannot bootstrap target-to-DC data from licensed screens, academic literature, or simulated assays — by construction, those datasets lack the counterfactuals that matter. The companies that own both the generative stack and the wet-lab decision log will widen their lead each quarter. Everyone else is optimizing on the wrong distribution.
Read more →Week Ahead
What to watch, May 11–17.