In this week’s edition of InnovationRx, we look at the richest five healthcare billionaires, Lilly’s first big AI success, Science Corp.’s brain implants, and more. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

This week, Forbes unveiled its annual Billionaires list, featuring 3,428 entrepreneurs, investors and heirs from around the world. That’s a record since we began tracking the fortunes of the ultra-wealthy in 1987. And while AI may have the spotlight, more than 260 billionaires made their money in healthcare, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, health tech and life sciences investing. These are the five richest:

Thomas Frist, Jr. & Family ($41.8 billion/United States)

The former Air force flight surgeon, now 87, founded Hospital Corporation of America with his father in 1968. Today, HCA Healthcare operates 190 hospitals and around 2,400 other ambulatory care sites in the U.S. and the U.K., and commands more than a quarter of the healthcare provider market in the United States..

Cyrus Poonawalla ($26.5 billion/India)

The son of a horse breeder, Poonawalla, now 84, founded Serum Institute of India in 1966 and has grown it into a powerhouse vaccine maker, producing 1.5 billion doses annually to protect patients against polio, flu and measles. In January, the company entered an agreement with Oxford University to develop a vaccine for Rift Valley fever.

Dilip Shanghvi ($26.3 billion/India)

Shanghvi, 70, borrowed $200 from his father in 1983 to start Sun Pharmaceuticals. Today, the publicly traded firm (market cap $47 billion) manufactures both drugs and active pharmaceutical ingredients. It has expanded its dermatology portfolio in recent years and is also reportedly mulling an acquisition of women’s health company Organon.

Zhong Huijuan ($18.7 billion/China)

Huijuan, 65, is chairperson and CEO of Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group, which produces drugs for cancer, diabetes and other diseases. It’s recently been licensing more of its drugs internationally, including a late 2024 deal with Merck for its in-development pill for obesity. China’s richest self-made woman, she’s half of that country’s drugmaking power couple with husband Sun Piaoyang.

Sun Piaoyang ($12.3 billion)

Piaoyang, 67, is chairman of Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, which makes treatments for cancer and infectious diseases. Its drugs have been sought after by large pharma companies, and last summer, it struck a deal with GSK to develop a dozen drugs across multiple diseases worth up to $12 billion.

Read our whole Billionaires package here.

How Lilly Used AI To Crank Up Production Of Its Popular GLP-1s

There’s been huge hype around AI’s potential for drug discovery. But at Eli Lilly, the world’s largest drug company, the first big, unsung payoff from AI has been in manufacturing its popular GLP-1 drugs, Zepbound (for weight loss) and Mounjaro (for diabetes).

“We literally made more product last year than we possibly could have without AI,” Diogo Rau, Lilly’s chief information and digital officer, tells Forbes. While he declined to specify exact numbers, he says it was “enough that it would’ve been material in our earnings reports.”

That’s a big deal for Lilly because demand for these injectable drugs has been sky high — and the company has struggled to make enough of them. From late 2022 through 2024, the FDA determined there was a shortage of these drugs, which meant compounders were allowed to make them under certain conditions despite the drugs’ patent protections.

“That was top of mind for us that we want to not be on the shortage list,” says Rau, who joined Lilly in 2021 after a decade at Apple and reports directly to CEO David Ricks. “We had a process that we all thought we had optimized. The risk of being on shortage made us look [again] even though we thought we had a process that was as good as it could be.”

Read the full story here.

BioNTech’s Founders Will Leave And Start A New mRNA Company

BioNTech’s founding couple, Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, plan to leave by yearend to start a new mRNA-focused company. The German drugmaker, best known for developing a Covid-19 vaccine, announced their planned departure as, respectively, CEO and chief medical officer, on Tuesday. The move comes as demand for Covid-19 shots has fallen, and as the company reported a 2025 revenue drop of 24% to $3.3 billion (at current exchange rates). BioNTech is now focused on developing cancer drugs.

The new company, which does not yet have a name, plans to research and develop next-generation mRNA medicines. It will gain certain rights to BioNTech’s mRNA technology, while the existing firm will get a minority stake in it.

“Özlem and I are ready to become pioneers again,” Sahin said in a statement. “Our vision has always been to translate our science into meaningful advances for patients, and we see extraordinary opportunities to unlock the next generation of transformative innovations.”

BioNTech, which is publicly traded with a market cap of $21 billion, said that it is currently looking for successors to Sahin and Türeci. Its shares dropped 18% on Tuesday. Jefferies biotech analysts said in a Tuesday note that “the stock still looks cheap to us,” noting that it was trading close to cash value.

Forbes profiled Sahin, a mild-mannered Turkish immigrant who moved to Germany with his parents at age 4, in April 2021, as its Covid vaccine was becoming widely available. He became a billionaire with the vaccine’s success, and Forbes estimates that he is currently worth $3.9 billion.

Science Corp, which is developing brain implants for a variety of conditions, raised $230 million at a valuation, according to VC database PitchBook, of $1.5 billion. The Alameda, Calif.-based company plans to use the capital to commercialize its Prima device, which aims to restore sight to patients with degenerative retinal diseases. A clinical study published in October found that the eye implant restored functional central vision to 80% of enrolled patients with age-related macular degeneration, a condition that affects 5 million people. Max Hodak was formerly president of Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink before leaving to found Science in 2021.

The FDA approved the decades-old prescription vitamin leucovorin to treat cerebral ​folate deficiency,but stopped short of approving it for autism in general, despite members of the Administration lauding it as a potential therapy.

Hims & Hers will stop marketing compounded GLP-1s and sell Novo’s brand-name Wegovy injections and pills, ending the companies’ acrimonious dispute.

The FDA’s series of denials of rare disease treatments has dashed the hopes of families desperate for a cure.

Chinese biotech firms are now competing for some of the priciest gene therapies.

One month after TrumpRx’s launch the website has few drugs listed and uneven savings.

Vinay Prasad will be stepping down from his post as head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (again).

© Forbes