NIH award to UCLA's Palermo funds AI work on CRISPR design, with no figure disclosed

A grant with no published figure

UCLA announced the award. It is an Early Stage Investigator Maximizing Investigators' Research Award, or ESI MIRA R35, from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. No dollar figure appears in the university's announcement.

Public grants and private capital are both moving toward AI-designed DNA. That changes what a university lab or a small biotech can attempt without building its own experimental pipeline. The geography is lopsided: the US and China take more than 80% of global venture investment in AI, while Europe and the UK together account for roughly 7%. How much of that money reaches DNA synthesis specifically is not broken out in the published figures. The size of the newest NIH award has not been disclosed.

The grant supports the Palermo Lab's effort to combine molecular simulations with AI. The aim is to map how CRISPR-Cas9 edits DNA and to guide the design of more precise genome-editing tools. The lab's recent work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society showed how interpretable AI can reveal the molecular mechanisms behind DNA recognition by CRISPR-associated proteins. Palermo joined UCLA as a full professor on 1 July 2026. She moved her group from the University of California, Riverside, where she was a professor of bioengineering and chemistry.

MIRA works differently from the standard model. It funds an investigator's overall research through a single unified grant, not a stack of individual project grants. The programme says this gives researchers more stability and flexibility.

The money map behind the science

Corporate investment in AI reached $252.3 billion in 2024, according to a BCC Research report published on 3 November 2026. That marked a 44.5% rise in private investment and a 12.1% rise in M&A activity. It also marked a more than thirteenfold increase in overall AI investment since 2014. Venture capital told a similar story earlier: AI businesses drew about $3 billion in 2012 and $75 billion in 2020, when roughly 20% of all VC went to AI.

The split is stark. The US led global private AI investment with $109.1 billion in 2024, followed by China at $9.3 billion. More than 80% of global VC investment in AI came from US and China-based companies, while Europe accounted for about 4% and the UK about 3%.

Adoption inside companies moved quickly too. The share of businesses using AI in at least one function rose from 55% in 2023 to 78% in 2024. Use of generative AI jumped from 33% to 71% over the same period.

What AI changes at the bench

BCC Research argues the effect shows up at the design stage. Generative AI and large language models are producing regulatory elements, promoters, enhancers and gene-editing proteins that do not exist in nature, the report says.

The report credits AI with cutting development timelines from months to weeks. It does this by predicting sequence functionality and optimising codon usage before any laboratory work begins. It lists protein language models, diffusion-based generative AI for synthetic DNA regulatory elements, and deep learning and CNN/RNN models for CRISPR guide RNA optimisation among the techniques cited. It also says AI improves target selection, sgRNA design, off-target prediction, Cas protein discovery and protein function analysis.

Private raises and public labs

The private side has produced large cheques. Generate Biomedicines raised $400 million in IPO proceeds in 2026 to expand AI-driven protein therapeutic design, according to BCC Research. Profluent raised $106 million in 2025, bringing total funding to about $150 million.

Public and university money is moving in parallel. A*STAR and NUS announced the A*STAR SIFBI-NUS Synthetic Biology Joint Lab. Its initial focus is nutrition and consumer care, with wider applications in advanced materials and health. The two institutions said the lab would pair A*STAR SIFBI's bioprocess development and scale-up work with NUS's strengths in fundamental science and talent development. The announcement cited a bioeconomy projected to contribute up to US$4 trillion annually within the next decade.

Smaller exchanges are part of the same push. CUHK Medicine sent 14 early-career researchers to Shenzhen on 20 and 21 October for an AI for Medicine forum co-hosted with SIAT. The group toured a Synthetic Biology Research Facility there.

What none of these announcements settle is scale. The BCC Research figures cover AI investment broadly, not gene synthesis alone, and the Palermo award carries no published amount.