Chinese scientist He Jiankui wants to end Alzheimer’s and thinks Silicon Valley is conducting a “Nazi eugenic experiment.”

The startup has partnered with Eli Lilly and enjoys the backing of some of Silicon Valley's most influential VCs.

Merge Labs has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding from OpenAI and others. It aims to use ultrasound to read from and write to the brain.

Mitera Biosciences is taking a cue from one of nature’s most effective biological tricks: how a mother’s body avoids rejecting a fetus.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based startup is emerging from stealth with $1.75 million in funding and a mission to develop new therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection. The company’s approach centers on a specific protein naturally expressed by the placenta during pregnancy.

“Our focus is really going back to nature and the human maternal-fetal relationship,” said Kevin Chow, Mitera’s co-founder, CEO and president. The startup is “trying to leverage what our bodies do naturally to help us with our immuno-tolerance.”

The startup, which uses a Greek word for “mother,” hopes its therapeutics can eventually replace traditional immunosuppressing drugs. Existing medications often hobble a patients’ helpful immune response, leaving them vulnerable to infections and causing toxic side effects over long-term use.

‘Important agent to investigate’

Mitera is working to commercialize intellectual property being exclusively licensed from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

While the startup is keeping the specific protein’s identity under wraps, it confirmed it is produced in the thymus — a gland that’s active in the immune system — and the placenta.

The protein plays a dual role: it bolsters regulatory T (Treg) cells, which protect the body’s own tissues, while dampening effector T (Teff) cells, which lead the attack against perceived invaders.

Given the protein’s role with these essential immune system players, “we felt it would be an important agent to investigate as a potential therapeutic,” Dr. Stanley Jordan, Mitera’s co-founder and chief scientist, said via email.

Mitera’s leadership team

Mitera’s three co-founders are longtime biotech leaders or medical providers.

• Chow is a serial biotech entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led Vitaeris, which worked on a treatment for kidney transplant rejection and was acquired by CSL Behring. Chow also works part time with Incisive Genetics, a startup developing a delivery system for gene therapy treatments.
• Jordan is a 40-year veteran of nephrology and transplant immunology and the medical director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai.
• Dr. S. Ananth Karumanchi, co-founder and lead scientific advisor, has been at Cedars-Sinai since 2017 and conducts research in hypertension in pregnancy and cardiovascular disease associated with kidney disease.

Mitera currently has seven employees. It conducts lab work at Cedars-Sinai and Contract Research Organizations (CROs), while its headquarters are in Bellevue.

The startup’s initial funding was led by Cedars-Sinai and provided as a SAFE, or Simple Agreement for Future Equity that allows an investor to receive a stake in the business in the future.

The biology underlying Mitera’s pursuit is “really new,” Chow said. While there’s clear potential for treating transplant patients, the therapy “could be used for so many bigger, broader diseases out there,” he added. “And that’s really exciting.”

A Seattle-area startup called Pauling.AI is harnessing artificial intelligence to automate the early steps that lead to the discovery of new drugs. The technology can complete tasks in a matter of weeks that previously required three to six months, said founder and CEO Javier Tordable.

Using AI to accelerate research timelines could ultimately spark an exponential increase in new treatments, proponents say.

“The dream of a lot of people in the field would be that, at some point, we’ll go from 30 or 40 new drugs approved every year to 300 or 400,” Tordable said, “and cure all sorts of diseases.”

Tordable launched his company in 2024 after a 16-year tenure at Google, most recently as the technical director of the company’s healthcare and life sciences initiatives. While he doesn’t have expertise in biology or chemistry, Tordable said he’s skilled at building tech tools that can perform complex tasks — such as those required to create new pharmaceuticals.

The startup operates on a “scientist-as-a-service” model, allowing researchers to outsource early steps in the drug discovery process to AI. The platform performs computational chemistry work, engineering drug candidates and modeling how they might interact with molecules and inhibitors within a cell.

The result is a curated list of small-molecule compounds that scientists can then move into a physical laboratory for testing as therapeutics. In the future, the startup would like to produce more complex compounds as drug candidates, such as antibodies.

To accomplish all of this, Pauling is building automation tools that engage with existing large language models and databases from numerous sources.

The startup has six employees who work remotely. Its leadership includes Chief Scientific Officer Oleksandr Savytskyi, a computational biologist who worked in academia in Ukraine and did research at the Mayo Clinic.

Pauling has secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Flex Capital and angel investors. It currently serves less than a dozen customers, including several high-profile academic institutions, Tordable said.

The company joins a burgeoning field of AI-biotech ventures, with numerous Pacific Northwest startups: Variational AI in Vancouver, B.C.; Seattle-based Potato and Synthesize Bio; and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle. Additionally, FutureHouse is a California nonprofit in this sphere.

Ultimately, Tordable hopes that by shrinking the time and cost of drug development, it will become economically feasible to tackle rare diseases that are typically not served by big pharma, providing overlooked patients with treatments and cures.

“The nice thing of working in this field is that we’re not necessarily doing it just for economic returns,” Tordable said. “There’s also an enormous benefit to humanity.”

In a remarkable pivot, Athira Pharma is shifting its primary focus from Alzheimer’s to oncology following a multi-year period marked by clinical failures and leadership turnover.

The Bothell, Wash.-based company announced today that it has licensed a Phase 3 breast cancer drug from Sermonix Pharmaceuticals, supported by $90 million in funding from a group of healthcare investment firms. It could land an additional $146 million if the research yields promising results.

Athira will simultaneously continue researching ATH-1105, its own drug candidate for treating ALS.

Athira President and CEO Mark Litton called the development “exciting and transformative news.”

“By securing rights to this late-stage program — while also advancing pATH-1105 for ALS — we are building a pipeline that we believe has the potential to change lives and create enduring value,” Litton said on LinkedIn. “We are honored to have the backing of some of the most respected biotechnology funds in the industry.”

Following the deal announcement, the company’s stock rose 70% to $7 per share.

Athira has been through a tumultuous few years:

• Its Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate, called fosgonimeton, stumbled and then failed a Phase 2/3 trial last year.
• That sank Athira’s stock price and triggered a layoff of 49 employees, or about 70% of its workforce in September 2024.
• In 2021, Athira CEO and President Leen Kawas resigned after it was confirmed she had altered images in scientific papers from her graduate studies that helped form the company’s foundation.

Details on the deal

Under today’s deal, Athira secures an exclusive license to develop and commercialize the breast cancer therapeutic for nations outside of Asia and select Middle Eastern countries. The drug, called lasofoxifene, is currently in a clinical trial that has enrolled over half of its target patient population, with initial results expected in mid-2027.

The agreement provides Sermonix with 5.5 million shares of Athira’s stock. The Seattle company has also committed to paying Sermonix up to $100 million plus limited royalties if certain commercial targets are reached.

Three lead investors are backing the research: New York’s Commodore Capital, biotech hedge fund Perceptive Advisors, and California-based TCGX. Additional participants are ADAR1, Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, Kalehua Capital, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Spruce Street Capital and 9vc.

Athira raised $90 million by selling stock and warrants to investors, extending its cash runway into 2028. If investors choose to exercise those warrants in the future, the company could receive up to an additional $146 million to fund its clinical programs.

“We’re proud to support this evolution and excited by the opportunity to deliver meaningful impact for patients and shareholders alike,” said Joseph Edelman, founder and CEO of Perceptive Advisors, in a statement.

Regarding its own ALS drug candidate, Athira this year successfully completed Phase 1 safety trials, and plans to start Phase 2 trials early next year.

A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into the taboo technology.  

The new company, called Preventive, is being formed to research so-called “heritable genome editing,” in which the DNA of embryos would be modified by correcting harmful mutations or installing beneficial genes. The goal would be to prevent disease.

Preventive was founded by the gene-editing scientist Lucas Harrington, who described his plans yesterday in a blog post announcing the venture. Preventive, he said, will not rush to try out the technique but instead will dedicate itself “to rigorously researching whether heritable genome editing can be done safely and responsibly.”

Creating genetically edited humans remains controversial, and the first scientist to do it, in China, was imprisoned for three years. The procedure remains illegal in many countries, including the US, and doubts surround its usefulness as a form of medicine.

Still, as gene-editing technology races forward, the temptation to shape the future of the species may prove irresistible, particularly to entrepreneurs keen to put their stamp on the human condition. In theory, even small genetic tweaks could create people who never get heart disease or Alzheimer’s, and who would pass those traits on to their own offspring.

According to Harrington, if the technique proves safe, it “could become one of the most important health technologies of our time.” He has estimated that editing an embryo would cost only about $5,000 and believes regulations could change in the future. 

Preventive is the third US startup this year to say it is pursuing technology to produce gene-edited babies. The first, Bootstrap Bio, based in California, is reportedly seeking seed funding and has an interest in enhancing intelligence. Another, Manhattan Genomics, is also in the formation stage but has not announced funding yet.

As of now, none of these companies have significant staff or facilities, and they largely lack any credibility among mainstream gene-editing scientists. Reached by email, Fyodor Urnov, an expert in gene editing at the University of California, Berkeley, where Harrington studied, said he believes such ventures should not move forward.

Urnov has been a pointed critic of the concept of heritable genome editing, calling it dangerous, misguided, and a distraction from the real benefits of gene editing to treat adults and children. 

In his email, Urnov said the launch of still another venture into the area made him want to “howl with pain.”  

Harrinton’s venture was incorporated in Delaware in May 2025,under the name Preventive Medicine PBC. As a public-benefit corporation, it is organized to put its public mission above profits. “If our research shows [heritable genome editing] cannot be done safely, that conclusion is equally valuable to the scientific community and society,” Harrington wrote in his post.

Harrington is a cofounder of Mammoth Biosciences, a gene-editing company pursuing drugs for adults, and remains a board member there.

In recent months, Preventive has sought endorsements from leading figures in genome editing, but according to its post, it had secured only one—from Paula Amato, a fertility doctor at Oregon Health Sciences University, who said she had agreed to act as an advisor to the company.

Amato is a member of a US team that has researched embryo editing in the country since 2017, and she has promoted the technology as a way to increase IVF success. That could be the case if editing could correct abnormal embryos, making more available for use in trying to create a pregnancy.

It remains unclear where Preventive’s funding is coming from. Harrington said the $30 million was gathered from “private funders who share our commitment to pursuing this research responsibly.” But he declined to identify those investors other than SciFounders, a venture firm he runs with his personal and business partner Matt Krisiloff, the CEO of the biotech company Conception, which aims to create human eggs from stem cells.

That’s yet another technology that could change reproduction, if it works. Krisiloff is listed as a member of Preventive’s founding team.

The idea of edited babies has received growing attention from figures in the cryptocurrency business. These include Brian Armstrong, the billionaire founder of Coinbase, who has held a series of off-the-record dinners to discuss the technology (which Harrington attended). Armstrong previously argued that the “time is right” for a startup venture in the area.

Will Harborne, a crypto entrepreneur and partner at LongGame Ventures, says he’s “thrilled” to see Preventive launch. If the technology proves safe, he argues, “widespread adoption is inevitable,” calling its use a “societal obligation.”

Harborne’s fund has invested in Herasight, a company that uses genetic tests to rank IVF embryos for future IQ and other traits. That’s another hotly debated technology, but one that has already reached the market, since such testing isn’t strictly regulated. Some have begun to use the term “human enhancement companies” to refer to such ventures.

What’s still lacking is evidence that leading gene-editing specialists support these ventures. Preventive was unsuccessful in establishing a collaboration with at least one key research group, and Urnov says he had harsh words for Manhattan Genomics when that company reached out to him about working together. “I encourage you to stop,” he wrote back. “You will cause zero good and formidable harm.”

Harrington thinks Preventive could change such attitudes, if it shows that it is serious about doing responsible research. “Most scientists I speak with either accept embryo editing as inevitable or are enthusiastic about the potential but hesitate to voice these opinions publicly,” he told MIT Technology Review earlier this year. “Part of being more public about this is to encourage others in the field to discuss this instead of ignoring it.”

OPINION — For most of modern history, asymmetric conflict conjured a familiar image: guerrillas in the hills, insurgents planting roadside bombs, or terrorists striking with crude weapons. The weak have traditionally offset the strong with mobility, surprise, and a willingness to take punishment.

That world is vanishing. A new age of synthetic asymmetry is emerging, one defined not by geography or ingenuity but by the convergence of technologies that enable small actors to wreak large-scale disruption. Unlike past asymmetry, which grew organically out of circumstance, this new form is engineered. It is synthetic, built from code, data, algorithms, satellites, and biotech labs. Here, “synthetic” carries a double meaning: it is both man-made and the product of synthesis, where disparate technologies combine to produce effects greater than the sum of their parts.

The implications for global security are profound. Power isn’t just about the size of an army or the depth of a treasury. It’s increasingly about who can combine technologies faster and more effectively.

A Brief History of Asymmetry

The weak finding ways to resist the strong is as old as conflict itself, but each era has defined asymmetry differently – shaped by the tools available and the political conditions of the time.

Nineteenth and 20th century resistance fighters, from Spain’s guerrilleros against Napoleon to Mao’s partisans in China, pioneered strategies that leveraged terrain, mobility, and popular support to frustrate superior armies. These methods set the template for Vietnam, where North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces offset American firepower by blending into the population and stretching the war into a contest of political will.

The late 20th century brought new asymmetric forms. In Afghanistan, the mujahideen used Stinger missiles to neutralize Soviet air power. In Iraq, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the great equalizer, allowing insurgents to impose costs on heavily armored U.S. forces. Al-Qaeda and later ISIS demonstrated how transnational terrorist networks could project power globally with minimal resources, using ideology and spectacular violence to substitute for armies.

By the early 2000s, the cyber domain opened an entirely new front. The 2007 attacks on Estonia, widely attributed to Russian actors, showed that digital disruption could cripple a modern state without conventional force. Just three years later, the Stuxnet worm revealed how code could achieve effects once reserved for kinetic strikes, sabotaging Iranian nuclear centrifuges. These incidents marked the beginning of cyber as a core tool of asymmetric power.

The Arab Spring of 2011 revealed another evolution. Social media allowed activists to outmaneuver state censorship, coordinate mass mobilizations, and project their struggles globally. Authoritarian regimes learned just as quickly, harnessing the same tools for surveillance, propaganda, and repression. Asymmetric power was no longer only about insurgents with rifles; it could be exercised through smartphones and hashtags.

What began as the playbook of the weak has now been eagerly adapted by the strong. Russia weaponized social media to influence elections and deployed “little green men” in Crimea, deniable forces designed to blur the line between war and peace. Its use of mercenary groups like Wagner added a layer of plausible deniability, allowing Moscow to project power in Africa and the Middle East without formal commitments. China has fused state and private industry to pursue “civil-military fusion” in cyberspace, using intellectual property theft and digital influence campaigns to achieve strategic goals without firing a shot. Even the United States, though historically the target of asymmetric tactics, has employed them, using cyber operations like Stuxnet and financial sanctions as tools of coercion.

This adaptation by great powers underscores the shift: asymmetry is no longer just the recourse of the weak. It has become a strategic option for all actors, strong and weak alike. These episodes trace an arc: from guerrilla tactics shaped by terrain to a world where asymmetry is engineered by design.

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Convergence as a Weapon

Synthetic asymmetry is not the product of a single breakthrough. It’s a result of technologies intertwining, with emergent results exceeding the sum of the parts.

● Artificial intelligence and autonomy turn cheap drones into swarming strike platforms and enable generative AI-fueled propaganda that is instantly localized, highly scalable, and adapts in real time.

● Biotechnology, leveraged by the democratization of tools like CRISPR and gene synthesis, opens doors to agricultural sabotage, engineered pathogens, or personalized biotargeting once confined to elite labs.

● Cyber and quantum computing erode modern infrastructure–today through leaked state tools in criminal hands, tomorrow through quantum’s threat to encryption.

● Commercial space assets put reconnaissance and global communications in reach of militias and small states.

● Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance fund rogue actors and blunt the power of sanctions.

● Undersea infrastructure opens a highly asymmetric chokepoint, where low-cost submersibles or sabotage can sever global fiber-optic cables and energy pipelines, inflicting massive economic damage.

This is less about any one killer app than about convergence itself becoming a weapon.

Asymmetric warfare has always been about imbalance, but the shift to synthetic asymmetry is an exponential leap. A single phishing email can cripple a city’s infrastructure. Off-the-shelf drones can threaten billion-dollar ships. AI-powered disinformation efforts can destabilize national elections. This new ratio of effort to impact is more disproportionate than anything we’ve seen before.

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Where Synthetic Asymmetry Is Already Here

Ukraine's defense shows what convergence looks like in practice. Commercial drones retrofitted for combat, AI-assisted targeting, crypto-based crowdfunding, and open-source satellite intelligence have allowed a middle-sized country to hold its own against one of the world’s largest militaries. The drone is to the 21st century what the AK-47 was to the 20th: cheap, accessible, and transformative.

In Gaza, reports suggest AI-driven targeting systems have accelerated lethal decision-making. Proponents say they improved efficiency; critics warn they lowered thresholds for force and reduced accountability. Either way, the software changed the calculus of war. When algorithms operate at machine speed, traditional political checks on violence weaken.

Iran has demonstrated how low-cost drone technology can harass U.S. naval forces and regional shipping. These platforms cost a fraction of the vessels and missile defenses required to counter them. Combined with cyber probes against Gulf energy infrastructure, Iran illustrates how synthetic asymmetry allows a mid-tier state to impose global strategic costs.

China’s campaigns against Taiwan go beyond military intimidation. They include AI-generated disinformation, synthetic social media accounts, and coordinated influence operations designed to erode trust in democratic institutions. This is synthetic asymmetry in the cognitive domain, an attempt to shift political outcomes before shots are ever fired.

In parts of Africa, mercenary groups operate with funding streams routed through cryptocurrency wallets, supported by commercial satellite communications. These mercenaries operate in gray zones, blurring the line between private enterprise and state proxy. Accountability vanishes in a haze of digital anonymity. Ransomware gangs, meanwhile, already display near-peer disruptive power. They freeze hospitals and pipelines, extract ransoms, and launder funds through crypto markets. Add generative AI for phishing and deepfake voices for fraud, and these groups begin to resemble stateless proto-powers in the digital realm.

The Private Sector as a Geopolitical Actor

Synthetic asymmetry also elevates the role of private companies. Commercial satellite firms provided Ukraine with near-real-time battlefield imagery. SpaceX’s Starlink network became essential to Kyiv’s communications, until its corporate leadership balked at enabling certain military uses. Crypto exchanges, meanwhile, have been both conduits for sanctions evasion and partners in enforcement.

These examples reveal a new reality: private entities now hold levers of power once reserved for states. But their interests are not always aligned with national strategies. A tech CEO may prioritize shareholder value or brand reputation over geopolitical objectives. This creates a new layer of vulnerability—governments dependent on private infrastructure must negotiate, persuade, or regulate their own corporate champions to ensure strategic alignment. The private sector is becoming a semi-independent actor in world politics.

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The Cognitive and Economic Fronts

Perhaps the most destabilizing form of synthetic asymmetry lies in the cognitive domain. Deepfakes that impersonate leaders, AI-generated news outlets, and precision microtargeting of narratives can shape perceptions at scale. The cost of attack is negligible; the cost of defense is nothing less than the integrity of public discourse. For democracies, the danger is acute because open debate is their lifeblood.

Synthetic asymmetry also reshapes geopolitics through finance. North Korea has bankrolled its weapons programs through crypto theft. Russian oligarchs have sheltered assets in opaque digital networks. Decentralized finance platforms move billions across borders beyond the reach of traditional oversight. This financial shadow world undermines sanctions, once a cornerstone of Western statecraft, and allows actors to sustain pressure that would once have been crippling.

Why Democracies are Both Vulnerable and Strong

Herein lies the paradox: democracies are more exposed to synthetic asymmetry precisely because of their openness. Their media, economies, and political systems are target-rich. Legal and ethical constraints also slow the adoption of equivalent offensive tools.

Yet democracies hold underappreciated strengths: decentralized command cultures that empower rapid adaptation, innovation ecosystems that thrive on openness and collaboration, and alliances that allow for collective defense. The task is to recognize culture itself as a strategic asset and to organize defense not around any single domain, but across all of them.

Ethical and Legal Frameworks in Flux

The rise of synthetic asymmetry is colliding with international law and norms written for an earlier era. The legal status of cyber operations remains contested: is a crippling ransomware attack on a hospital an act of war, or a crime? The Tallinn Manual, NATO’s best attempt at clarifying how international law applies in cyberspace, remains largely aspirational.

AI-driven weapons systems pose even sharper dilemmas. Who is accountable when an algorithm selects a target in error? Should lethal decision-making be delegated to machines at all? The pace of technological change is outstripping the slow processes of treaty-making, leaving a widening gap between capability and governance, a gap where much of the risk resides.

Beyond Cold War Deterrence

Traditional deterrence, threatening massive retaliation, works poorly in a world of synthetic asymmetry. Many attackers are diffuse, deniable, or stateless. They thrive in gray zones where attribution is murky and escalation is uncertain.

What’s required is not just more technology, but a new doctrine for resilience: one that integrates cyber, cognitive, biological, economic, and space defenses as a single system. That doctrine has not yet been written, but its absence is already being exploited. At ISRS, we see this convergence daily, working with governments and institutions to adapt strategies for engineered asymmetric disruption.

We are at a hinge moment in strategic affairs. Just as the machine gun upended 19th-century doctrine and nuclear weapons reordered 20th-century geopolitics, the convergence of today’s technologies is reshaping the distribution of power. The future won’t be decided by who fields the biggest army. It will be decided by who can synthesize technologies into a disruptive force faster. That is the coming age of synthetic asymmetry. The question is whether democracies will recognize it and prepare before it fully arrives.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

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