A Drug That Reverses Lung Damage?

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Dr. Ayesha Khanna
April 11, 2026 • Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Hi! Here are today’s top AI stories:

  • A Drug That Reverses Lung Damage? AI Found It.

  • AI is Preparing Your Moisturizer 🧴

  • AI Around the World

NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS

A Drug That Reverses Lung Damage? AI Found It.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine

Finding a new drug the traditional way takes 10-15 years, costs over $2 billion, and most candidates still fail. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has decided that's no longer acceptable — and they're turning to AI to change the math.

Lilly just signed a $2.75 billion deal with AI biotech Insilico Medicine for an exclusive worldwide license to develop its AI-designed oral therapeutics across cancer, metabolic disease, and immunology.

What Insilico actually does — and why it matters.

  • Insilico's AI platform identifies disease targets and designs new molecules to treat them — compressing years of lab work into months.

  • Its lead drug, rentosertib, targets idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a chronic lung disease where tissue progressively scars and stiffens, making it harder to breathe. There's no cure, and existing treatments only slow it down.

  • The AI identified the target and designed the drug candidate in about 13 months — a process that traditionally takes 4–6 years.

  • In a clinical trial published in Nature Medicine in June 2025, patients on the highest dose saw lung function improve while those on placebo declined — suggesting the drug may not just slow the disease but partially reverse it. Rentosertib is now in Phase II trials in the U.S.

The pharma’s target: cut the typical 10-year drug development timeline down to five.

AI is Preparing Your Moisturizer 🧴

You've probably used a L'Oréal product at some point. Moisturizer, sunscreen, foundation. What you probably didn't know is that the next one might never be touched by a human scientist until it's basically already done.

L'Oréal partnered with Nvidia to bring AI into the earliest stage of skincare development — molecular design. The technology, Nvidia's ALCHEMI framework, simulates how ingredients interact with skin, hold up in sunlight, and behave inside a formula — all at the atomic level, before anything is mixed in a lab.

Traditional cosmetics R&D is slow. Mix, test, adjust, repeat — for months. ALCHEMI runs thousands of these experiments virtually and simultaneously, making discovery up to 100x faster. L'Oréal is starting with sun protection and skin tone products.

What makes this interesting isn't just speed — the AI simulates molecular behavior that would take human scientists decades to model manually. Your next sunscreen might be designed by an AI that understood your skin better than any chemist could, one molecule at a time.

Would you use a skincare product formulated entirely by AI?

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AI Around the World

🇺🇸 OpenAI has acquired TBPN, a live-streaming tech talk show popular among developers and entrepreneurs, for a reported sum in the "low hundreds of millions" - with the hosts set to continue their show while also supporting OpenAI's marketing and communications.

🌍 Data centres currently account for just 1% of global electricity demand and 0.5% of CO2 emissions - and the IEA expects that share to reach only 1.4% at max by 2030. The picture is more concentrated in certain countries, with data centres expected to account for roughly half of all electricity demand growth in the US and Japan over the next five years, and fossil fuels still powering nearly 60% of these facilities today.

🇺🇸 AI code review startup Qodo has raised $70M to address what its CEO calls the growing problem of "AI slop" in enterprise codebases. Qodo works by analyzing how developers at a given company actually write and review code, turning that institutional knowledge into automated rules that flag anything that shouldn't ship.

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Until next time!

Amplify Team ❤️

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