David Liu, the Harvard biochemist, was sitting in a meeting last week when his phone started buzzing repeatedly.

Unbeknownst to him, minutes prior the CRISPR company Intellia had finished unveiling their approach to base editing at a Cold Spring Harbor Lab conference. First pioneered by Liu and his lab in 2016, the method allows you to change individual DNA bases without breaking the double helix, an advance that could prove critical for treating a long list of cancers and genetic diseases.

Over the last four years, Neta Raab and Ido Bachelet have received hundreds of padded cardboard boxes containing frozen poop from wild animals on five different continents.

The packages came regularly to their lab outside Tel Aviv, sent from a squad of zoologists and specialized Israeli army veterans who tracked enough animals to fill a Rudyard Kipling novel, rushing to collect vulture and rhino and frog samples within an hour of extrusion. Raab and Bachelet carefully opened the boxes, removing the samples from plastic-wrapped tubes and then using specialized magnetic beads to fish out the bacterial DNA inside for sequencing.

Several biotechs and pharma companies are looking to discover a universal flu vaccine that could protect humans from any strain of the virus, regardless of which is predicted to circulate. But given how many of these efforts are likely years away at best, are there any intermediate steps available to bridge that gap?

That’s the question University of Washington researcher Neil King and a group of NIH scientists are hoping to answer. In a new Nature paper published Wednesday, the team was able to demonstrate broad effectiveness in animal models for a “super-seasonal” flu vaccine by displaying multiple flu strains at the same time. And King says it’s starting human trials at the end of April.

The rise of AI in drug discovery has presented a buffet of tasty options for drugmakers to identify better molecules for hard-to-hit targets. That promise is mixed, to say the least, but startups like Montreal’s Valence Discovery think they’ve cracked the code — and at least one small biotech is convinced.

Valence, a recently uncloaked AI startup specializing in deep learning in drug discovery, has licensed its tech to Canada’s Repare Therapeutics to identify effective synthetic lethality molecules, the companies said Wednesday.

Eli Lilly is rejoining the KRAS hunt.

The Indianapolis Big Pharma revealed Thursday, in an abstract for AACR, that it has been working on a new small molecule to target the infamous oncogene and are planning to put it into Phase I later this year. It marks Lilly’s first public foray into the field in nearly a year, since it ditched its first molecule after seeing dangerous side effects in five patients.

Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics have shown they can use the gene editing tool to cure, for at least a couple years, a handful of patients with sickle cell disease and are now entering late-stage development.

It’s a major advance, but it comes with the same caveats that have plagued other gene therapies for sickle cell. You have to give patients what amounts to a bone marrow transplant: a laborious, expensive and occasionally risky procedure that involves removing stem cells from their marrow, editing them in a facility and then re-injecting them. Any company that could find a way to edit cells with a simple IV infusion could make those older approaches obsolete.