Weekly AI/ML & Biotech Digest — Aug 3 to Aug 9, 2026

Curated weekly digest of notable AI/ML and biotech developments. Flagged items are manually selected; remaining items are the week's most recent.

🧬 Biotech

• ★ CAFE: A Co-folding Approach for Fragment Exploration of Allosteric and Cryptic Binding Sites — Co-folding models hold immense potential for allosteric drug discovery, but have been severely hampered by their systematic bias toward orthosteric ligand binding.
• ★ Decoding cancer circulating transcriptomic signatures with language models — Current liquid biopsy methods for multi-cancer detection using plasma cell-free RNA (cfRNA, short RNA fragments circulating in blood that can reflect disease states) typically rely on gene annotations, which can overlook signals from unannotated or repetitive genomic regions.
• ★ An expanded codebook of human transcription factor DNA-binding specificity — Abstract Gene expression is regulated by transcription factors (TFs), which recognize specific DNA sequence motifs.
• ★ Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models — Many important biological functions arise not from single genes but from complex interactions encoded by entire genomes.