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Under cover of the coronavirus chaos and amidour national uprising, Republicans have quietly uprooted some of their most controversial right-wing members of Congress only to replace them with even more radical contenders for federal office, including devotees of the nonsensical QAnon conspiracy theory, ahead of this fall's election.

More than 10years after the Tea Party movement gave rise to the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus by targeting longtime incumbent Republicans who were deemed insufficiently right-wing, a recent set of wins by insurgent candidates over some of the most radical Republicans in Congress makes clear that the GOP has now passed every off-ramp on the road to extremism. While the mass Republican retirements ahead of the 2018 midterm elections greatly weakened the GOP, this cycle's purging of incumbents in safe red districts, will likely serve to further radicalize the GOP caucus.

On Saturday, in a novel case of voter suppression, a small group of Republicans in Virginia's 5th district voted to oust Rep. Denver Riggleman, a far-right Freedom Caucus member who voted with President Trump nearly 95% of the time since winning a competitive 2018 race amid a Democratic wave.

An Air Force veteran who favors the legalization of marijuana, but can hardly be described as a moderate, Riggleman ran afoul of his fellow Republicans when his libertarian leanings led him to officiate a same-sex wedding ceremony for two former campaign volunteers last year.

"I'd have been a coward if I didn't," Riggleman told NPR. "The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln, we're the party of individual liberty."

"The Republican Party, when you look at the creed to protect civil liberties and religious liberties, could be the most inclusive party in the country," Riggleman said on the campaign trail. "And you know, why aren't we a big-tent party? Why aren't we looking at liberties first? Why aren't we allowing people to live the way they want to live and stopping the government from reaching into every aspect of our lives?"

Instead, after losing every statewide race in the past decade and losing the entire General Assembly, Virginia Republicans decided that fighting equal rights for the LGBTQ community was the hill to die on, during Pride month no less. Due to the coronavirus, and in a process Riggleman claims was engineered to hurt his campaign, roughly 2,500 party activists cast ballots in a drive-through format in a parking lot. Although the district is larger than New Jersey, Republicans only allowed voting at one location a church in the winner's home area.

Bob Good, who defeated Riggleman in that primary, is a fundamentalist zealot and aformer athletics director at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Good essentially ran for office because he was upset by Riggleman's involvement in a gay wedding, calling Riggleman "out of step with the base of the party." A born-again evangelical Christian and staunch social conservative, Good wants to end birthright citizenship and opposes abortion for any reason even if the mother's life is in danger.

Republicans have a six-point registration edge in Virginia's rural 5th district, so in all likelihood Good will take office as an extremist backbencher who introduces wild bills that go nowhere. But there is a slim chance that Good won't even make the general election ballot this fall, as the Washington Post explains:

Good missed the Tuesday deadline for filing a key form related to his candidacy, but he hand-delivered the form to the state elections office on Friday afternoon, election officials said. The board of elections routinely offers extensions in cases like these, and changing election dates due to the coronavirus may have created confusion about the deadline.

This may just be Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. The district has been re-gerrymandered to offset declines in rural populations and growth in urban populations in the last two cycles because it's been harder and harder to maintain as a "safe" seat for the GOP each cycle. After Riggleman's loss this weekend, the Cook Political Report announced it will movethe Virginia 5thfrom "Likely Republican" to "Lean Republican." If the GOP had just left this seat alone, it would have taken a lotfor a Democrat to unseat Riggleman, even in another wave election. Good winning this primary means that there's a slightly better chance for this seat to flip than there was before. It's also conceivable Rigglemanruns as a write-in Libertarian candidate, even just to play spoiler since he views the primary process as so rigged.

The notorious Rep. Steve King of Iowa is another right-wing incumbent who has already been booted from office this cycle. King, who has represented Iowa's 4th district in the northwestern part of the state since 2013, suffered a nearly double-digit defeat at the hands of state Sen. Randy Feenstra, who outraised King in the first quarter of the year by nearly $400,000.

It was the first defeat of King's career, who has long been outspoken about his radical views. He warned on Twitter that "cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end" and cautioned that Americans cannot "restore our civilization with somebody else's babies."

After winning re-election by only three points in a deepred district in 2018, the nine-term Republican congressman was finally removed from three committee assignments by the leaders in his own party after he questioned the offensiveness of the term "white supremacist" in an interview with The New York Times.

Feenstra did not attack King forhis racism, however, instead touting his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association and endorsements from the Chamber of Commerce, former Iowa governor Terry Branstad and the National Right to Life Committee. With King's loss, the chances for a Republican pick-up appear further out of reach.

Republicans also appear poised to send at least one QAnon believer to Congress this fall. Roughly 50 QAnon supporters are running for Congress this year, according to Media Matters.

In May, Jo Rae Perkins won the Republican Senate primary in Oregon with more 49% of the vote against three other candidates. Shetold the New York Times, referring to the "Q" conspiracy theories,that "as people put together more and more pieces of the puzzle, they can see, yeah, this is real." She's been endorsed by Republicans in the state legislature and by the Republican candidate vying for Oregon's 4th congressional district.

"Q is a patriot," said Marjorie Taylor Greene in a YouTube video posted in 2017, referencing the anonymous seeder of the online theory that DonaldTrump is waging a secret war against a cabal of pedophile political elites.

On Tuesday, Greene beat six Republican candidates running for the seat left vacated by retiring Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia, qualifying for an August runoff against an an opponent she led in the first round by 20 points. The district is a safe Republican seat, and Greene claims to have the endorsement of Rep Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the leading House Republicans.

These Republican candidates who believe in a satanic, pedophile deep state, and want to purge any member who even participates in a same-sex wedding are supported by Republican officials andleadership, as well as the party'svoters. Forget what that says about these particular individuals and their campaigns what does it sayabout the Republican Party?

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GOP purges right-wing members from Congress to replace them with even more radical candidates - Salon

If you're a senior banker, how important is it that you have a glowing Wikipedia entry? Many in the industry may not have given it much thought. However,someone claiming to be acting on behalf of Andrea Orcel has been taking an interest in his own particulary entry.

For anyone who hasn't visited it, Orcel's Wikipedia pageis a work of art. Running to nearly 4,000 words it details everything you could want to know about a banker who it says has, "consolidated an enduring legacyof being one of the most successful investment bankers of his generation." Alongside a description of theSantander saga, there are words on Orcel's time atUBS, a detailed dealmaking list and a section entitled 'Public Image and Legacy.'

Orcel's lengthy entry might simply be because he is "widely known"as the "Ronaldoof investment banking" (in the words of his page).

However, it couldalso be because people acting in Orcel's interest have been contributing.According to the revision history for Orcel's page, a Wikipedia editor 'MAaR11Aa 2019' restructured the 'profile' in April 2020to "make it simpler and more organized." The editor claims thathe or shemade the changes, "at the request of Mr Orcel." The same editor has made around 26 other amendmentssince February 2019. It's not clear that the changes were genuinelymade at the request of Orcel or not.

Some of the most recent changes include: replacing the word 'controversial' with 'leading' in the sentence, 'Orcel is a controversial figure in European business and international banking;' removing a sentence that said Orcel had been criticized for an abrasive management style, overworking subordinates and being hyper-competitive;and removing a claim that Orcel received $12m in advisory fees for the RBS-ABN AMRO deal of 2007, plus the fact that the deal was subsequently dubbed "disastrous" by the Daily Telegraph. The pages created byMAaR11Aa 2019in April arevisible hereand here.

It's not clear whoMAaR11Aa 2019is. The editor may have nothing to do with Orcel, despite claiming to act on his behalf.Many of the changes made in late April weresubsequentlyreversed by other Wikipedia users and proved onlytransitory. If you're a senior banker interested in managing your public profile, this might seem a bit of a shame. It will be interesting to see whether further edits follow.

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment youd like to share? Contact: sbutcher@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance. Whatsapp/Signal/Telegram also available. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will unless its offensive or libelous (in which case it wont.)

Photo by Muhamad Reza Junianto on Unsplash

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Andrea Orcel and the importance of having a positive Wikipedia page - eFinancialCareers

This is part 2 in a series of investigative reports on the systemic problems with Wikipedia. Read part 1 here: Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing

Internet encyclopedia giant Wikipedia has listed The Grayzone as a deprecated source, censoring the independent organization, alongside several other news websites, on an official blacklist of taboo media outlets.

The blacklisting is the result of a long-running campaign run by a coterie of regime-change activists who have effectively hijacked Wikipedia, scrubbing the site of information that runs counter to their sectarian agenda and editing their political adversaries out of existence.

At no point has this cabal of editors pointed to a pattern of errors or fabrications by The Grayzone. Instead, they have argued for its blacklisting on the grounds of the political views of its writers, a wholesale violation of Wikipedia guidelines that demand neutrality in editing.

As detailed in part one of this series, Wikipedia founders and the Wikimedia Foundation have done nothing to address the fundamental corruption of the internet encyclopedia they oversee by a gang of hyper-partisan censors.

That might be because the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, veteran US regime-change operative Katherine Maher, share the interventionist and corporate agenda that disproportionately powerful, neoconservative-oriented editors advance under their watch.

Born from seemingly humble beginnings, the Wikimedia Foundation is today swimming in cash and invested in many of the powerful interests that benefit from its lax editorial policy.

The foundations largest donors include corporate tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Craigslist. With more than $145 million in assets in 2018, nearly $105 million in annual revenue, and a massive headquarters in San Francisco, Wikimedia has carved out a space for itself next to these Big Tech oligarchs in the Silicon Valley bubble.

It is also impossible to separate Wikipedia as a project from the ideology of its creator. When he co-founded the platform in 2001, Jimmy Jimbo Wales was a conservative libertarian and devoted disciple of right-wing fanatic Ayn Rand.

A former futures and options trader, Wales openly preached the gospel of Objectivism, Rands ultra-capitalist ideology that sees government and society itself as the root of all evil, heralding individual capitalists as gods.

Wales described his philosophy behind Wikipedia in specifically Randian terms. In a video clip from a 2008 interview, published by the Atlas Society, an organization dedicated to evangelizing on behalf of Objectivism, Wales explained that he was influenced by Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rands novel The Fountainhead.

Wikipedias structure was expressly meant to reflect the ideology of its libertarian tech entrepreneur founder, and Wales openly said as much.

At the same time, however, Wikipedia editors have upheld the diehard Objectivist Jimmy Wales, as the New York Times put it in 2008, as a benevolent dictator, constitutional monarch, digital evangelist and spiritual leader.

Wales has always balanced his libertarian inclinations with old-fashioned American patriotism. He was summoned before the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Operations in 2007 to further explain how Wikipedia and its related technologies could be of service to Uncle Sam.

Wales began his remarks stating, I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.

At a time when the United States has been increasingly criticized around the world, I believe that Wikipedia is an incredible carrier of traditional American values of generosity, hard work, and freedom of speech, Wales continued, implicitly referencing the George Bush administrations military occupation of Iraq.

The Wikipedia founder added, The US government has always been premised on responsiveness to citizens, and I think we all believe good government comes from broad, open public dialogue. I therefore also recommend that US agencies consider the use of wikis for public facing projects to gather information from citizens and to seek new ways of effectively collaborating with the public to generate solutions to the problem that citizens face.

In 2012, Wales married Kate Garvey, the former diary secretary of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their wedding, according to the conservative UK Telegraph, was witnessed by guests from the world of politics and celebrity.

Wales status-quo-friendly politics have only grown more pronounced over the years. In 2018, for instance, he publicly cheered on Israels bombing of the besieged Gaza strip and portrayed Britains leftist former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation claim to have little power over the encyclopedia itself, but it is widely known that this is just PR. Wikimedia blew the lid off this myth in 2015 when it removed a community-elected member of its board of trustees, without explanation.

At the time of this scandal, the Wikimedia Foundations board of trustees included a former corporate executive at Google, Arnnon Geshuri, who was heavily scrutinized for shady hiring practices. Geshuri, who also worked at billionaire Elon Musks company Tesla, was eventually pressured to step down from the board.

But just a year later, Wikimedia appointed another corporate executive to its board of trustees, Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti.

The figure that deserves the most scrutiny at the Wikimedia Foundation, however, is its executive director Katherine Maher, who is closely linked to the US regime-change network.

Maher boasts an eyebrow-raising rsum that would impress the most ardent of cold warriors in Washington.

With a degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University, Maher studied Arabic in Egypt and Syria, just a few years before the so-called Arab Spring uprising and subsequent Western proxy war to overthrow the Syrian government.

Maher then interned at the bank Goldman Sachs, as well as the Council on Foreign Relations and Eurasia Group, both elite foreign-policy institutions that are deeply embedded in the Western regime-change machine.

At the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Maher says on her public LinkedIn profile that she worked in the US/Middle East Program, oversaw the CFR Corporate Program, and Identified appropriate potential clients, conducted outreach.

At the Eurasia Group, Maher focused on Syria and Lebanon. According to her bio, she Developed stability forecasting and scenario modeling, and market and political stability reports.

Maher moved on to a job at Londons HSBC bank which would go on to pay a whopping $1.9 billion fine after it was caught red-handed laundering money for drug traffickers and Saudi financiers of international jihadism. Her work at HSBC brought her to the UK, Germany, and Canada.

Next, Maher co-founded a little-known election monitoring project focused on Lebanons 2008 elections called Sharek961. To create this platform, Maher and her associates partnered with an influential technology non-profit organization, Meedan, which has received millions of dollars of funding from Western foundations, large corporations like IBM, and the permanent monarchy of Qatar.

Meedan also finances the regime-change lobbying website, Bellingcat, which is considering a reliable source on Wikipedia, while journalism outlets like The Grayzone are formally blacklisted.

Sharek961 was funded by the Technology for Transparency Network, a platform for regime-change operations bankrolled by billionaire Pierre Omidyars Omidyar Network and billionaire George Soros Open Society Foundations.

Maher subsequently moved over to a position as an innovation and communication officer at the United Nations Childrens Fund, UNICEF. There, she oversaw projects funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the US State Department which finances regime-change operations and covert activities around the globe under the auspices of humanitarian goodwill.

Soon enough, Maher cut out the middleman and went to work as a program officer in information and communications technology at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), which was created and financed directly by the US government. The NDI is a central gear in the regime-change machine; it bankrolls coup and destabilization efforts across the planet in the guise of democracy promotion.

At the NDI, Maher served as a program officer for internet freedom projects, advancing Washingtons imperial soft power behind the front of boosting global internet access pursuing a strategy not unlike the one used to destabilize Cuba.

The Wikimedia Foundation CEO says on her LinkedIn profile that her work at the NDI included democracy and human rights support as well as designing technology programs for citizen engagement, open government, independent media, and civil society for transitional, conflict, and authoritarian countries, including internet freedom programming.

After a year at the NDI, she moved over to the World Bank, another notorious vehicle for Washingtons power projection.

At the World Bank, Maher oversaw the creation of the Open Development Technology Alliance (ODTA), an initiative that uses new technologies to impose more aggressive neoliberal economic policies on developing countries.

Mahers LinkedIn page notes that her work entailed designing and implementing open government and open data in developing and transitioning nations, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

At the time of her employment at the World Bank, the Arab Spring protests were erupting.

In October 2012, in the early stages of the proxy war in Syria, Maher tweeted that she was planning a trip to Gaziantep, a Turkish city near the Syrian border that became the main hub for the Western-backed opposition. Gaziantep was at the time crawling with Syrian insurgents and foreign intelligence operatives plotting to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Just two months later, in December, she tweeted that was was on a flight to Libya. Just over a year before, a NATO regime-change war had destroyed the Libyan government, and foreign-backed insurgents had killed leader Muammar Qadhafi, unleashing a wave of violence and open-air slave markets.

Today, Libya has no unified central government and is still plagued by a grueling civil war. What Maher was doing in the war-torn country in 2012 is not clear.

Mahers repeated trips to the Middle East and North Africa right around the time of these uprisings and Western intervention campaigns raised eyebrows among local activists.

In 2016, when Maher was named executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a prominent Tunisian activist named Slim Amamou spoke out, alleging that Katherine Maher is probably a CIA agent.

Amamou briefly served as secretary of state for sport and youth in Tunisias transitional government, before later resigning. He noted that Maher traveled to the country several times since the Arab Spring protests broke out in 2011, and he found it strange that her affiliations kept changing.

Maher replied angrily, seriously, Slim? Youve welcomed me in your home.

Amamou shot back, you gave me the impression that you were not who you claimed to be back then.

Maher denied the accusation. Im not any sort of agent, she said. You can dislike me, but please dont defame me.

Amamou responded, I dont dislike you. Im doing my duty of protecting the internet.

Amamou lamented that the Wikimedia foundation is changing.. and not in a good way.

Its sad, because rare are organisations that have this reach in developing world, he added.

In April 2017, in her new capacity as head of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher participated in an event for the US State Department.

The talk was a Washington Foreign Press Center Briefing, entitled Wikipedia in a Post-fact World. It was published at the official State Department website.

Maher spoke about the libertarian philosophy behind Wikipedia, echoing the Ayn Randian ideology of founder Jimmy Wales.

When journalists asked how Wikipedia deals with highly charged topics, where some entities sometimes countries, sometimes various other entities are often engaged in conflict with each other, Maher repeatedly provided a non-answer, recycling vague platitudes about the Wikipedia community working together.

The Grayzone has clearly demonstrated how Wikipedia editors overwhelmingly side with Western governments in these editorial conflicts, echoing the perspectives of interventionists and censoring critical voices.

A few months later, in January 2018, Maher appeared on a panel with Michael Hayden, the former director of both the CIA and NSA, and a notorious hater of journalists, as well with a top Indian government official, K. VijayRaghavan.

The talk, entitled Lies Propaganda and Truth, was held by the organization behind the Nobel Prize.

The moderator of the discussion, Mattias Fyrenius, the CEO of the Nobel Prizes media arm, asked Maher: There is some kind of information war going on and maybe you can say that there is a war going on between the lies, and the propaganda, and the facts, and maybe truth do you agree?

Yes, Maher responded in agreement. She added her own question: What are the institutions, what is the obligation of institutions to actually think about what the future looks like, if we actually want to pass through this period with our integrity intact?

Hayden, the former US spy agency chief, then blamed the Russians for waging that information war. He referred to Moscow as the adversary, and claimed the Russian information bubble, information dominance machine, created so much confusion.

Maher laughed in approval, disputing nothing that Hayden said. In the same discussion, Maher also threw WikiLeaks (which is blacklisted on Wikipedia) under the bus, affirming, Not WikiLeaks, I want to be clear, were not the same organization. The former CIA director next to her chuckled.

Today, Maher is a member of the advisory board of the US governments technology regime-change arm the Open Technology Fund (OPT) a fact she proudly boasts on her LinkedIn profile.

The OPT was created in 2012 as a project of Radio Free Asia, an information warfare vehicle that the New York Times once described as a worldwide propaganda network built by the CIA.

Since disaffiliating from this CIA cutout in 2019, the OPT is now bankrolled by the US Agency for Global Media, the governments propaganda arm, formerly known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

Like Mahers former employer the National Democratic Institute, the OPT advances US imperial interests in the guise of promoting internet freedom and new technologies. It also provides large grants to opposition groups in foreign nations targeted by Washington for regime change.

While she serves today as the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher remains a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, a Washington, DC think tank that grooms former military and intelligence professionals for careers in Democratic Party politics.

The Truman Project website identifies Mahers expertise as international development.

As The Grayzones Max Blumenthal reported, the most prominent fellow of the Truman Project is Pete Buttigieg, the US Naval intelligence veteran who emerged as a presidential frontrunner in the Democratic primary earlier this year.

The extensive participation by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation in US government regime-change networks raises serious questions about the organizations commitment to neutrality.

Perhaps the unchecked problem of political bias and coordinated smear campaigns by a small coterie of Wikipedia editors is not a bug, but a deliberately conceived feature of the website.

Ben Norton is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker. He is the assistant editor of The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with editor Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.comand he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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Meet Wikipedias Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundations regime-change operative CEO - The Grayzone

By Bio-IT World Staff

June 17, 2020 |Big investments this past month in machine-learning driven drug discovery frominsitro, andDNAnexussand cloud-based informatics platform. Vaccine funding forGreenLightBiosciences,boron drug delivery,and moreof the latest funding updates from across life sciences, clinical trials, the diagnostics industries.

$143M:Machine-Learning-Enabled Drug Discovery

insitro, a San Francisco machine-learning driven drug discovery and development company, has raised $143 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing. The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from new investors Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, as well as funds managed by BlackRock,CasdinCapital, HOF Capital,WuXiAppTecsCorporate Venture Fund, and other undisclosed investors. Current investors also participated in the financing. Proceeds from the financing will be used to continue to buildinsitrosfoundations of technology and automation, enabling data generation at larger scale and further expanding the capabilities to generate predictive models of human disease. In addition, this capital will be used to prosecute newly identified, genetically validated targets, to identify patient segmentation biomarkers, and to advance therapeutics ingenetically-definedpatient populations.insitroalso plans to establish new, synergistic industry partnerships and build additional ML-enabled capabilities along the R&D value chain in order to accelerate drug discovery and development.

$120M:Speeding Supply Chain

Rapid Micro Biosystems, Lowell, Mass., has completed a $120 million financing, including an equity investment led by Ally Bridge Group, along with Endeavour Vision and existing investors including Bain Capital Life Sciences, Longitude Capital,XerayaCapital and Asahi Kasei. Proceeds will enable the company to meet growing demand for its automated microbial detection platform and support new product development for pandemic response. It will also accelerate new product development of a rapid sterility test for the final release of products which can significantly shorten the supply chain by accelerating deployment of biologics, vaccines and cell therapies to patients, and fund further commercial expansion in the United States, Europe and Asia.

$119M:mRNA COVID-19 Vaccine

GreenLightBiosciences, Boston, has closed two recent funding rounds: a $17 million special purpose funding round in May and a $102 million round in June. Both rounds come from new and existing investors. The May $17 million round was directed toward building out its scalable mRNA production capability targeting the production of billions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine. In addition to expanding its manufacturing capacity,GreenLightis developing several differentiated mRNA vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. mRNA-based vaccines offer the potential to address pandemics because of shorter pre-clinical development times compared to traditional vaccines. The June $102 million round is broader, meant to rapidly expand production of its RNA products for agricultural and life sciences applications. Participating investors in the May round include Flu Lab,XerayaCapital, and Baird Capital. Participating investors in the June round include Morningside Ventures, agriculture venture firm S2G Ventures, Cormorant Asset Management, Continental Grain Company, Fall Line Capital, Tao Capital Partners, Baird Capital, MLS Capital Fund II, Lewis and ClarkAgriFood, andLupaSystems.

$100M:Cloud-Based Informatics Platform

DNAnexus, Mountain View, Calif.,has closed a $100 million financing round. The financing was led by Perceptive Advisors andNorthpondVentures, joining existing investors GV,ForesiteCapital, TPG Capital, and First Round Capital, and first-time equity investor Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. These funds will advance the companys growth globally, enablingDNAnexusto further serve leading healthcare and life science organizations. TheDNAnexusPlatform accelerates digital transformation by simplifying complex data analysis, clinical data management, and insights at a scale not previously possible.

$100M:Health Monitoring System, COVID-19 Test

Cue Health, San Diego, has closed its Series C financing round, raising $100 million in new capital. Investors in Cues Series C include Menlo Park-basedDechengCapital,ForesiteCapital, Madrone Capital Partners, Johnson & Johnson Innovation - JJDC, Inc., ACME Capital and other investment firms. Proceeds from the financing will be used to complete development, validation, and scale-up of manufacturing of the Cue Health Monitoring System and Cue Test Cartridges. Cues operations, including manufacturing, are vertically integrated and currently occupy approximately 55,000sqft in San Diego, CA USA. The company plans to increase its footprint to over 110,000sqft to better support development and commercialization of its products, including a fast, portable, and easy-to-use molecular test for COVID-19, which is currently under review by the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization.

$70M:NGS Automation, Epidemic Response

GinkgoBioworks, Boston, announced a $70 million investment from Illumina and existing Ginkgo investors, General Atlantic and Viking Global Investors to build infrastructure to enable rapid epidemic response. Next-generation sequencing, coupled with Ginkgo's hardware and software that is designed for the large-scale automation of biological experiments, has the potential to significantly increase COVID-19 testing capacity, contributing to the testing volume that many public health experts believe is necessary for slowing the spread of the virus. Ginkgo is deploying its resources toward building an epidemic monitoring and diagnostic testing facility in its Boston Seaport labs, developing processes that use Illumina's NGS technology for large-scale testing, in addition to whole genome sequencing and environmental monitoring. Currently in an early build phase, Ginkgo aims to have NGS-based testing capacity available to help reopen schools and businesses.

$60M:Series AStructural Immunology Platform

VentusTherapeutics, Boston and Montreal,announced a $60 million Series A financing led by founding investor Versant Ventures with participation by GV (formerly Google Ventures). Proceeds will be used to advance three pipeline programs and to expand the companys structural immunology platform to pursue previously intractable drug targets.Ventus structural immunology platform is based on protein engineering capabilities with the necessary know-how to generate and express stable monomers of known targets, including the inflammasomes and nucleic acid sensing targets. This in turn enables the elucidation of protein structures and the implementation of direct biochemical and biophysical assays that previously did not exist.

$50M:Cloud R&D Platform

Benchling,San Francisco,announced it closed $50 million in Series D funding led byAlkeonand joined by new investors Spark Capital, Lux Capital and ICONIQ Partners, as well as existing investors Thrive Capital, Benchmark and Menlo Ventures.Benchlingwill use the investment to build advanced product capabilities, expand its international presence, and drive adoption across leading R&D organizations, bringing the power of modern-day software to drive the rapid transformation of the life sciences industry.

$30M:Boron Drug Delivery

TAE Life Sciences (TLS), Santa Monica, Calif., has launched its in-house boron delivery drug development program supported by an influx of $30M in funding. The initial phase of the B-round funds comes from a consortium of investors including ARTIS Ventures, who led the companys initial funding in 2018. TLS is a biological-targeting radiation therapy company developing next-generation boron neutron capture therapy solutions (BNCT). This investment will enable TLS to move beyond the current boron-10 drug, BPA, and speed development of novel proprietary boron-10 target drugsat the same time thatit hones its neutron beam accelerator technology for BNCT. BNCT is a particle therapy designed to selectively destroy cancer cells without damaging neighboring healthy cells. The TLS diversified drug program objectives include improved targeting of cancer cells, increased boron accumulation in target cells, longer boron retention time, and more boron homogeneity.

$12M:Solid Cancer Monitoring, Treatment

C2i Genomics, New York, has raised $12 million in its Series A financing. The financing was led byCasdinCapital and joined by additional new investors including NFX Capital, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and other investors. Proceeds from the financing will be used to fund the development andclinical validation of C2i Genomics personalized, real-time solution for monitoring recurrence and treatment response for various types of solid cancers. C2i Genomics innovative solution is based on research performed at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) by Dr. AsafZviran, along with Dr. Dan Landau, core faculty member at the NYGC and assistant professor of Medicine at WCM, who serves as scientific co-founder and member of C2is scientific advisory board. The technology has been validated through longitudinal clinical cohorts in collaboration with cancer centers in New York and Boston and was recently published inNature Medicine(DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-0915-3). This proof-of-concept research was supported by a 2017 grant from The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research.

$10M: Series C Extension for High-Definition PCR

ChromaCode, Carlsbad, Calif., announced a $10 million Series C extension with an investment from Adjuvant Capital. The Adjuvant investment brings the companys total Series C funding to $38 million. Managing Partner Jenny Yip will joinChromaCodesBoard of Directors. Funding from this round will support global expansion and continued development ofChromaCodeshigh-definition PCR platform (HDPCR), through which the company recently launched a high-throughput SARS-CoV-2 Assay. Adjuvant joins existingChromaCodeinvestorsNorthpondVentures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Domain Associates, Windham Ventures, Okapi Ventures, Moore Venture Partners and the California Institute of Technology.

$6.2M:Antibiotic Resistance Diagnostics

Day Zero Diagnostics, Boston, was awarded up to $6.2 million in non-dilutive funding from Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X), a global non-profit partnership dedicated to accelerating early antibacterial research and development to address the rising global threat of drug-resistant bacteria. Day Zero uses genome sequencing and machine learning to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. The new funds will support the development of Day Zeros diagnostic system that is intended to help physicians quickly and accurately diagnose and treat life-threatening bacterial infections. The system promises to help patients with severe infections receive the most effective antibiotic treatment on the first day they are admitted to the hospitalday zerorather than being treated with multiple days of toxic broad-spectrum antibiotics to prevent septic shock.

$5M:Immuno-Oncology Drugs

Kineta, Seattle, Wash., is a clinical stage biotechnology company focused on the development of novel immunotherapies in oncology, neuroscience and biodefense. The company has successfully closed its most recent funding round totaling $5 million. This round was led by the Bellevue-basedSchlaepferFamily Foundation. Proceeds from this investment round will be used to fund the early development ofKineta'simmuno-oncology drug programs.Kinetais focused on developing new, best-in-class immunotherapies to address hard-to-treat cancers in a variety of solid tumors.

$2.5M:NCI Grant for Bioimaging

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been awarded a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Healths National Cancer Institute (NCI) to continue to develop new and innovative bioimaging techniques that also harness the power of machine learning methods. The grant will support the further development of a new imaging technique that will allow cancer biologists to observe the molecular, metabolic, and functional behavior of breast cancer cells when a targeted therapeuticspecificallyhuman epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)is introduced. It will be used in preclinical research using non-human models.

$2.5M:NIH Grant For Viral Tests

University of Texas,Dallas received a $2.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for work on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The grant, spread over five years, will support efforts to advance a novel infectious disease diagnostic approach, develop prototypes, and evaluate the method using clinical specimens. The goal is to develop a more accurate test that could be done while a patient is in the doctors office, although the work is several steps from that point. The method uses gold nanoparticles, which attach to antibody molecules that can recognize and bind with protein molecules found on the surfaces of viruses. Researchers apply short laser pulses to activate the nanoparticles to generate nanoscale bubbles, or nanobubbles. An accumulation of nanobubbles signals the presence of a virus.

$1.8M:Dental Tissue Engineering

LaunchPadMedical, Lowell, Mass.,has received follow-on support of up to $1.8 million from the Michigan-Pittsburgh-Wyss Regenerative Medicine Resource Center, which was funded by NIHs National Institute of Dental and Cranial Research (U24-DE029462) to improve the translation of promising tissue engineering and regenerative medicine technologies for dental, oral, and craniofacial clinical practice.This grant will allow the company to conduct a pivotal animal study and generate all the other required data to file an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) application with the FDA to start a clinical trial.

$1.7M:Gas-Sensing Gut Capsule

AtmoBiosciences, Melbourne and Sydney, Australia has raised a further A$2.5 million in an oversubscribed funding round, supplementing an initial seed raise in March 2019.Atmosingestible gas-sensing capsule continuously measures clinically important gaseous biomarkers produced by the microbiome in the gastrointestinal system. This data is transmitted wirelessly to the cloud for aggregation and analysis.Atmowill use the funds for continuedproduct development, manufacture of thesecond generationgas-sensing capsule, and pilot clinical trials aimed at developing a path to regulatory approval.

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Follow the Money: $100M to DNAnexus, Investments in Machine-Learning for Drug Discovery, More - Bio-IT World

Innovating At The Speed Of Machines

PAN-OS version 10.0 ushers in the worlds first machine learning-powered next-generation firewall to proactively assist in stopping threats, securing IOT devices and recommending security policies. The new operating system introduces a containerized form factor for the firewall and extends more visibility and security to unmanaged IoT devices without needing to deploy additional sensors, the company said.

The Internet of Things (IoT) market is expected to reach 1.1 trillion devices by 2026, and more than 70 percent of organizations are expecting to run containerized applications by 2023, said Karl Soderlund, senior vice president of worldwide channels. Customer demand is driving almost all partners to look at IoT security and container security, and the company wants to help with training and enablement.

Solution providers will need to qualify and discover these opportunities around IoT and container security, and might find theyre interacting with more of a DevOps buyer rather than a network security buyer, he said. The new offerings provide partners with a good opportunity to deliver managed services and professional services, particularly as it relates to implementation and pre-sales consulting, he said.

From the industrys first next-gen firewall for Kubernetes to gaining visibility into never-before-seen devices, here are five new products and features in PAN-OS 10 that leverage machine learning to keep customers safer.

5. Clustering and Signature Updates

New high-availability clustering capabilities in PAN-OS 10.0 is a best-of-breed feature intended to maximize availability for customers and simplify management for partners, according to Soderlund. Availability is essential to providing partners and customers with strong and secure defense, Soderlund said.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto Networks is introducing zero-delay signature update protection, resulting in a 99.5 percent reduction in systems infected, according to the company. The company said it was already leading the industry in reducing the reaction time for threats from days to minutes.

4. New Decryption Features

Encryption is getting more complex every day, and Soderlund said partners and customers alike must have the ability to break that down and figure out how to best secure their environments. Decryption has been a major area of focus for Palo Alto Networks as a table stakes way of simplifying security for customers, according to Soderlund.

The new decryption capabilities in PAN-OS 10 are based on enhancements and extensions to the 12-year-old decryption technology found in the companys next-generation firewalls, according to Palo Alto Networks. The new features enable more customers to fully deploy decryption and include support for the new TLS 1.3 standard, the company said.

3. In-Line Malware And Phishing Prevention

PAN-OS 10.0 leverages machine learning to make sure organizations are staying one step ahead of bad actors, according to Soderlund. As attackers use machines to automatically morph attacks, Palo Alto Networks said signatures become less valuable in preventing these attacks.

Network security products previously only used machine learning models for out-of-band detection, but Palo Alto Networks said its next-generation firewall now uses in-line machine learning models to help prevent previously unknown attacks.

The companys new cloud-based system is used to train and tune machine learning models to detect both known and unknown variants of real-world attacks the company is seeing in the wild that affect customers, As a result, Palo Alto Networks said it has observed up to 95 percent of unknown malware that previously required cloud-based detection now being blocked inline without hurting performance.

2. Discover And Protect Unmanaged IoT Devices

Palo Alto Networks acquisition of Zingbox last fall enhanced its visibility into never-before-seen devices to help detect new anomalies and vulnerabilities, Soderlund said. The companys new IoT security offering is delivered as a subscription off the companys firewall and recommends security policies to organizations to ensure any identified anomalies or vulnerabilities are addressed, Soderlund said.

Zingbox has been integrated with Palo Alto Networks App-ID technology to detect unique IoT devices and provide guidance on how to protect them without requiring additional sensors or equipment, Soderlund said. The offering doesnt require manual fingerprinting techniques, the counting of IoT devices for licensing or any other product for enforcement, according to Palo Alto Networks.

The offering will allow security teams to start reclaiming unmanaged IoT devices on PA-Series hardware appliances, VM-Series virtualized firewalls as well as the companys Prisma Access network security service. The tool competes with siloed IoT security products by delivering unmanaged device discovery, protection and enforcement in places where there are no existing firewalls, Palo Alto Networks said.

1. Containerized Version Of Firewall For Kubernetes

Over the next three years, Soderlund said most organizations will be running multiple containerized apps in the production environment. The new CN-Series is a containerized version of the companys firewall that helps network security teams ensure theyre compliant in container environments, and enables security at DevOps speed by speeding up the integration and provisioning process, he said.

Kubernetes is red hot right now, and Soderlund said Palo Alto Networks wanted a containerized form factor as part of their firewall to ensure both security and compliance. The CN-Series firewalls leverage deep container context to protect inbound, outbound and east-west traffic between container trust zones along with other components of enterprise IT environments, according to Palo Alto Networks.

The CN-Series can be used to protect critical applications against known vulnerabilities as well as both known and unknown malware until patches can be applied to secure the underlying compute resource. Applications are protected with the CN-Series in on-premise data centers like Kubernetes and RedHat OpenShift as well as the Kubernetes service from each of the big public cloud providers, the firm said.

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5 New Machine Learning Capabilities From Palo Alto Networks - CRN: Technology news for channel partners and solution providers