Days af­ter top­ping up In­sil­i­co Med­i­cine’s cash re­serves with a $60 mil­lion round, the glob­al AI play­er is re­design­ing its ex­ec­u­tive struc­ture with an un­usu­al twist as it shifts from pure drug de­sign and dis­cov­ery and builds out the pipeline with clin­i­cal stage as­sets.

A lit­tle more than a year af­ter step­ping in as the CSO, Feng Ren, the Har­vard grad and GSK vet with ex­pe­ri­ence in Philadel­phia and Shang­hai, is step­ping up to a co-CEO role. He’ll be in charge of the de­vel­op­ment work, as they start test­ing more of their drugs in hu­mans and put their promise of a more ef­fi­cient ap­proach to drug hunt­ing to the ul­ti­mate test.

He’ll be op­er­at­ing along­side Alex Zha­voronkov, the al­ways out­spo­ken com­pa­ny founder who’s cham­pi­oned all things AI, with new ro­bot­ics op­er­a­tions be­ing added to the dis­cov­ery mix as they raised more than $300 mil­lion in new mon­ey over the past year. Zha­voronkov stays in charge of the AI side of things.

He of­fered a thumbs up to his new “co-cap­tain,” promis­ing to set new records in speed­ing drugs in­to the clin­ic.

The move comes as In­sil­i­co push­es to­ward a promised Phase II for their fi­bro­sis drug and looks to add more to the pipeline as they ad­vance their pre­clin­i­cal work. Af­ter years of tout­ing the po­ten­tial of AI, the in­dus­try is get­ting to the point where hu­man da­ta will pro­vide hard proof for an in­dus­try niche that has at­tract­ed bil­lions in in­vest­ment. And In­sil­i­co is in the front ranks of that trend, poised to start of­fer­ing an ob­jec­tive grade on their ef­forts.

“We are at a piv­otal mo­ment. We have a clin­i­cal pro­gram, and we are hope­ful that many oth­er pro­grams will soon reach the clin­i­cal stage. We are al­so in the process of es­tab­lish­ing a ful­ly au­to­mat­ed AI-dri­ven ro­bot­ics lab, a cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy to ac­cel­er­ate our drug R&D,” says Ren.

That will like­ly leave both CEOs with plen­ty on the to-do list.

Cyclerion Therapeutics may have the design of a Phase IIb study ready to go, but it’s scrambling for a way to fund it.

The company said in a press release that it’s “actively evaluating the best combination of capital, capabilities, and transactions available to it to advance the development of zagociguat,” its lead candidate for a rare, genetic mitochondrial disease known as MELAS.

In a separate SEC filing, Cyclerion once again flagged “substantial doubt about (its) ability to continue as a going concern.” As of the end of 2022, it had cash and cash equivalents of only $13.4 million.

A small, Santa Ana-based biotech created in 2017 is looking to enter a SPAC deal as it lays out plans to begin trials in its lead cell therapy candidates and bring on new executives.

Graf Acquisition Corp. IV and NKGen Biotech announced Thursday, with few other details, that the two companies signed a non-binding letter of intent to “pursue a business combination.” Graf Acquisition II and III withdrew their IPOs last year.

The FDA has rejected Incyte’s extended-release formulation of ruxolitinib tablets, in a surprise setback for the company’s plans to build on its blockbuster Jakafi franchise.

The ruxolitinib XR tablets are designed to be taken once a day, whereas Jakafi is indicated for twice daily dosage (although some patients can take it once daily).

According to Incyte, the FDA acknowledged in its complete response letter that the study submitted in the NDA “met its objective of bioequivalence based on area under the curve (AUC) parameters but identified additional requirements for approval.”