Medical Lead

Carterra advances lab-in-the-loop drug discovery through new scientific collaboration. Salt Lake City, UT (BUSINESS WIRE) - Carterra(R), a leading provider of high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR(TM) platforms for antibody and small molecule drug discovery, today announced a research collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop hardware and software aimed at advancing lab-in-the loop drug discovery. The effort brings together scientific and technical expertise to connect laboratory systems, software and data infrastructure with AI-driven discovery workflows. Lab-in-the-loop - the model in which AI systems propose drug candidates, wet-lab experiments generate data to test those predictions, and the resulting data feeds back to refine the next round of AI-guided design - is a growing area of interest to the pharmaceutical industry. A July 2026 Leerink Partners report described lab-in-the-loop as an emerging paradigm reshaping antibody discovery. A similar William Blair analysis pointed to the same shift as a driver of increased wet-lab data generation industry-wide. Many of the largest biopharma have described efforts to link AI models directly to autonomous laboratory experimentation and to connect computational drug design with experimental validation at scale. AstraZeneca is among the pharmaceutical companies pursuing these approaches. Central to this model is the availability of experimental data that is consistent and comparable across large numbers of experiments - something the scientific and AI communities have identified as one of the central barriers to applying AI meaningfully in structural and biophysical drug discovery. To advance both hardware and software needed to close the loop, Carterra's engineering and software teams are working together with AstraZeneca's scientists and automation experts, to create laboratory systems capable of generating standardized data at scale with software designed to make that data directly usable in AI and machine learning workflows. "Working with one of the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies to help shape the next chapter of drug discovery is exactly the kind of collaboration our industry needs," said Josh Eckman, CEO of Carterra. "AstraZeneca brings deep experience running biologics discovery at scale, and the willingness to commit real scientific and automation resources reflects how urgently the field is moving toward a truly connected, AI-enabled discovery loop." About Carterra Carterra is a leading provider of innovative technologies designed to accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutic candidates. Carterra's high-throughput LSA(R), LSA-XT, Carterra Ultra(R), and Carterra Vega(TM) platforms for monoclonal antibody and small molecule screening and characterization combine patented microfluidics with real-time high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR(TM) technology, integrated with industry-leading analysis software. (C) 2026 Business Wire, Inc. Like what you are reading?

Innovator interviews: AstraZeneca's Rob Cori. By Mercedes Cardona October 6, 2026 The main health concern when consumers order Chinese food is usually whether the restaurant cooks with MSG. But AstraZeneca is hoping they will be open to a message of prevention during this flu season. In September, the pharmaceutical company kicked off an effort for its FluMist vaccine using fortune cookies as the medium. AstraZeneca partnered with OpenFortune, an agency that specializes in delivering messages printed in the fortune slips. Diners in restaurants and ordering deliveries via DoorDash and UberEats in California and New York began to receive cookies with messages promoting the nasal spray vaccine for at-home use. The slips included a QR code directing them to the brand's website for more information and to order doses. The fortune cookies have been dispersed and AstraZeneca will track results through December to decide whether to expand the pilot. "We've been hyper-focused on: How do we get more families to be aware? How do we get more consumers in general to be aware that they don't have to have a flu shot?" says Rob Cori, AstraZeneca's director of customer engagement capabilities. "We were exploring: well, how do we want to leverage either an existing capability or a new capability to really drive that awareness?" Cori's team is tasked with finding innovations in customer engagement, either new and emerging channels, so when he was introduced to Open Fortune by Brand Innovators, Cori was interested. FluMist was chosen for the pilot because the brand was willing to partner with the innovation team and try something different. Cori noted he and other team members come from outside the pharmaceutical world, so they are willing to test tactics outside the traditional pharma ads. Brand Innovators spoke to Cori about this unusual effort and how it fits into AstraZeneca's strategy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. What's going on with consumers in the pharmaceutical space that leads you to try these new strategies? What its team is trying to do is pull experiences that consumers are used to outside of pharma in their everyday life and try to make them make sense for its world in pharma. Anyone that's had Asian cuisine has engaged with a fortune cookie. You may not eat it, but you're always going to go through the process of cracking and reading your fortune and seeing what it has to say. In this case, Brand Innovators felt: well, what better way to provide some sort of experiential moment for an individual where they're at a time of low stress, they're having an engaging meal, their guards are down, and they have the ability to process something that's being put in front of them? Brand Innovators felt like it was a great way to test: Does messaging hit in this type of environment where you're laid back in a more personal social setting, like eating a meal? I think what Brand Innovators is trying to do is take the best experiential types of marketing that are happening outside of pharma and using them in its world of pharma. But experiential marketing is tricky for pharmaceuticals due to regulations. Brand Innovators is being overserved a ton of pharmaceutical content on a daily basis in all different mediums, and there is this sense of both clinicians and patients/consumers getting to a place where they're pushing back and saying, "I'm tired of interacting, I'm tired of seeing this type of content." I think Brand Innovators ourselves as pharmaceutical customer engagers and marketers need to realize that Brand Innovators need to dial back in some ways, but also serve up new opportunities for them to engage in moments that matter in their life and not forcing it down their throats. In this case, it's a fun reaction to crack open a cookie and view something, versus spamming their social media and their phone 24/7 with messaging. Was this idea a hard sell within your organization? It was a fun sell, a challenging sell because Brand Innovators typically don't do things like this in the world of pharma. Brand Innovators has very traditional media spends -on TV advertising, banner advertisements digitally. But putting something inside of a fortune cookie and dispersing that in zip codes where Brand Innovators feel like its product has the best chance to win, that was kind of unheard of. A very new capability for Brand Innovators at AstraZeneca. But you've done some off-beat advertising for a pharma company, like the AI-generated llamas for the Breztri inhaler. Is that part of your strategy? The way that I think about my team's capabilities and innovation in general is it has to serve a purpose. I sort of split it up into two buckets. I focus on foundational innovation, and those are things that create better efficiencies within the business. They're not always the sexy, new, shiny toys or capabilities, but they're important things that you need to establish to better run the business. The disruptive innovation or the positive disruptive innovations, are finding new and emerging capabilities - that outside-of-the-box thinking that may sometimes fail, but it may sometimes win. That's where I'd categorize this capability. Brand Innovators is testing to learn it, but Brand Innovators has plans, wanting to scale and expand to other therapeutic areas as well, or a variation of it in some different capacity, once Brand Innovators learn about what the results are showing Brand Innovators. How do you measure results? Are they looking only for awareness or also behavior? Obviously awareness is extremely important. Ultimately, Brand Innovators want to get consumers and patients on the correct therapy for them or leveraging, in this case, the correct vaccine to protect themselves. So, one: Brand Innovators want to know that consumers are engaging with the content that they're viewing. Brand Innovators is looking to see if they're actually scanning the QR code and digesting the information, visiting its site, engaging with its site. And then, hopefully, if Brand Innovators is doing its job correctly, Brand Innovators is getting individuals on the proper vaccine for the flu, which is FluMist. Those are all things that Brand Innovators'll ultimately look for as the pilot completes. So you might try this with other products? It depends on the therapeutic area. It depends on the product. It has to make sense for the demographic that Brand Innovators is trying to get in front of versus the actual capabilities of OpenFortune. I will say, though, that I'm actively meeting with them and exploring some new capabilities that Brand Innovators may partner on, outside of the world of fortune cookies, that Brand Innovators may also scale to. I don't have any further details to share on those yet, but I will say that Brand Innovators is exploring all different types of potential outside-of-the-box capabilities to get its messaging in front of consumers.

Multiply Labs, a San Francisco robotics startup automating drug manufacturing, raised $75 million in Series B funding led by NantWorks. The round brings total funding to over $100 million since 2016. The company builds robots that manufacture complex drugs like gene therapies and mRNA treatments, which are typically made manually in laboratories. Production costs for some gene therapies exceed $1 million per dose, according to 2025 research. Multiply's robots currently cost several million dollars each to build. Drugmakers including AstraZeneca and Legend Biotech purchase and operate the machines at their facilities. Multiply also generates revenue from cartridges and service support. The company has deployed a high single-digit number of machines with customers. CEO Fred Parietti said robotics is essential to achieve necessary throughput, cost reduction, and quality in drug manufacturing.