Reflections from BIO 2026: Why Disease Heterogeneity and Platforms Matter

By Gabe Musso, Chief Scientific Officer – July 17, 2026

Coming out of BIO, I was struck by how often our conversations circled back to the same themes.

Neurodegeneration remains a major focus across the industry. What felt different this year was how much more emphasis there was on understanding disease heterogeneity from the very start of a program, not as a problem to consider later.

There is growing recognition that a single diagnosis can encompass multiple sub-diseases, with patients who have very different underlying biology, trajectories, and treatment responses. That has direct implications for target selection, trial design, biomarker strategy, and patient stratification. The field is becoming more intentional about building that complexity into development plans up front.

We also noticed that platform conversations are now happening alongside asset-specific discussions. People wanted to understand both the opportunity around a particular program and the broader value of the platform that generated it. That was encouraging. Individual assets will always sit at the center of development and partnering, but there is clear and growing interest in platforms that can generate repeatable, insights across diseases.

At the same time, the attrition of the past few years was impossible to ignore. There are fewer companies, leaner teams, and tighter budgets. The effects have been felt across the sector. We feel fortunate to still be having serious conversations about our science, our platform, and where the work can go next. We do not take those conversations for granted, and we are deeply grateful to our team, collaborators, and stakeholders for helping us reach this point.

Soon, we’ll be sharing important findings from our platform in both neurodegeneration and biodefense. The applications are very different, but both depend on finding actionable biological signals within noisy, complex datasets. We’re looking forward to putting more of that work into the public domain and continuing the conversations that began at BIO.

Stay tuned. Follow us on LinkedIn and X to hear more as we release these findings.