AI pharma's pivotal test: Rentosertib Phase III readout due 2029
The article reports that Anew Labs, an AI drug-discovery company spun out of ByteDance, raised a $290 million first round at a $1.5 billion valuation, and that Anthropic has reportedly built a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area where Claude drives robots to run real biological experiments. It divides the AI pharma chain into three groups — upstream AI technology firms such as Insilico Medicine, midstream CRO/CDMO wet-lab service providers such as GenScript and Twist Bioscience, and downstream pharma companies including Fosun Pharma and Hengrui Pharmaceuticals — and cites brokerage estimates that AI can cut drug-discovery timelines by 70%-90% and total R&D cost by roughly 50%. The decisive test is Insilico's lead asset Rentosertib, whose Phase IIa showed a 98.4 mL mean lung-capacity gain at 60 mg versus a 20.3 mL decline in controls; its China Phase III began in July 2026 with 320 planned participants and top-line data expected in 2029.
A successful Phase III would be the field's key clinical proof point for AI-designed drugs, though the article notes Phase II success rates still show no statistical edge over traditional methods, so AI is shifting the bottleneck rather than removing it.