Healthcare

A new drug takes 10 to 15 years and roughly $2.6 billion to go from lab bench to pharmacy shelf. Most candidates fail. The process is brutal, expensive, and maddeningly slow — especially if you’re one of the millions of people waiting for a treatment that doesn’t exist yet. On April 16, 2026, OpenAI decided it wanted to fix that. The company launched GPT-Rosalind, its first AI model built specifically for life sciences research — and in doing so fired a shot directly at Google DeepMind’s long-standing dominance in AI-powered biology. Named after Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose X-ray crystallography work was essential to discovering DNA’s double helix, this isn’t just another ChatGPT update. It’s OpenAI’s declaration that the future of drug discovery runs through AI. ...

Cancer is terrifying for many reasons, but here’s the one that haunts oncologists: they often can’t tell which tumors will stay put and which will spread. By the time metastasis is detected — cancer cells colonizing distant organs — the window for effective intervention has often closed. A new AI tool from the University of Geneva is changing that equation. Called MangroveGS (Mangrove Gene Signatures), it predicts whether a cancer is likely to metastasize with nearly 80% accuracy — and it works across multiple cancer types. The research, published this week in Cell Reports, could reshape how doctors decide who needs aggressive treatment and who can be safely monitored. ...

The FDA has cleared over 1,357 AI-powered medical devices. Every single one of them used old-school AI — pattern recognition, image classification, signal analysis. Not one ran on a large language model. That just changed. RecovryAI, a San Francisco startup fresh out of stealth, announced that the FDA granted Breakthrough Device Designation to its generative AI chatbot for post-surgical recovery. It’s the first time the agency has given this designation to anything powered by an LLM — and the implications go way beyond one startup’s product. ...