Waiting until the very last minute, former US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’ special purpose acquisition company has found a business to buy: a biotech allied with Biogen on diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease.

Coming together are Cambridge, MA biotech Aprinoia Therapeutics and ROSS Acquisition Corp. II, with about $280 million of ROSS stock going toward the diagnostics and drug developer. Ross will give $7.5 million of his own money through a convertible note and up to $12.5 million at the time of closing, which is expected in the first half of this year, the companies said Wednesday.

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A small biotech looking to carve a lane in the tRNA field has folded, an investor and a co-founder confirmed to Endpoints News.

Similar to Flagship’s Alltrna and other upstarts like Takeda-backed hC Bioscience, the now-shuttered Theonys was attempting to go after transfer RNA, seen as a potential Swiss Army knife in the broader RNA therapeutics space. The idea is that one tRNA drug could be used across a galaxy of disorders and diseases.

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While OpenAI’s Microsoft-allied ChatGPT takes the world by storm, a fledgling startup in Berkeley, CA is debuting to take a similar language-learning model approach, but with the goal of designing new proteins.

Profluent, founded by a former Salesforce AI research leader, has secured $9 million to kick-start its work, with proceeds going toward building out an integrated wet lab and recruiting machine learning scientists and biologists. Insight Partners led the seed round. The investor base also includes Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures and Phoenix Venture Partners.

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At least two Neuralink employees have posted to LinkedIn in recent days saying they’ve been laid off from Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup, which has received backlash for animal testing.

A former staffer working on preclinical study design and an ex-lab director working on assessing the safety of Neuralink’s implanted devices (prior to human testing) announced recently they’d been laid off, specifically using that terminology. Both had worked at the startup for at least two years.

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When he finds the time to go fly fishing, Peter Joyce says gray wulffs, or mayfly mimics, are his good luck charm — he always catches a fish when he uses them. Joyce has now brought in $49 million in a Series B round for his biotech company Grey Wolf Therapeutics.

The Oxford, UK cancer biotech plans to use the funds to bring its first asset into human trials in the coming month or two, according to Joyce. Pfizer Ventures and Earlybird Venture Capital co-led the round, which the startup disclosed Thursday.

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