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RED QUEEN BIO APPOINTS IAN WATSON AS CHIEF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS OFFICER

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Senior biodefense and national security leader joins Red Queen Bio as the company expands its work at the intersection of biotechnology, AI and national security

BOSTON, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Red Queen Bio PBC, the AI biosecurity company, today announced the appointment of Ian Watson as Chief Government Affairs Officer, adding one of the country’s most experienced biodefense and biosecurity leaders to its executive team as the company builds a new generation of biological defense capabilities.

Watson will lead Red Queen Bio’s government affairs strategy and deepen the company’s engagement with key stakeholders across the federal government, national laboratories and agencies including the Department of War, Department of Energy and Department of Health and Human Services.

“Ian has spent his career operating at the intersection of frontier biotechnology, national security and public health,” said Nikolai Eroshenko, co-founder and CEO of Red Queen Bio. “The biosecurity landscape is evolving faster than many traditional systems were designed to respond. Red Queen Bio is building for that reality, and Ian understands what it takes to deploy and scale new technological capabilities.”

Watson has decades of experience spanning biodefense, biotechnology policy, pandemic preparedness and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense.

Most recently, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Defense, overseeing the development of chemical and biological defense capabilities for the Joint Force. He also served as Executive Secretary of the Biodefense Executive Council and led the Department of War’s Biosurveillance Program.

Before that, he was Deputy Assistant Secretary and Director of the Office of Strategy, Policy, Planning, and Requirements within the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response at the Department of Health and Human Services, where his responsibilities included industrial base expansion, supply-chain management and the Defense Production Act program during the COVID-19 response.

From 2018 to 2020, Watson was Assistant Director for Biotechnology and Biosecurity at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led the National Bioeconomy Initiative with the National Security Council, co-chaired National Science and Technology Council biodefense and biological sciences subcommittees, and helped shape federal policy around the bioeconomy and biological security.

Earlier in his career, Watson held a series of leadership roles at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, including overseeing international biological threat reduction programs. He began his career in missile defense and arms control, including work on the Army’s PAC-3 and MEADS programs.

“What drew me to Red Queen Bio is the ambition of the mission, and the amazing team they have assembled,” said Watson. “The biological threat landscape has consistently been described for more than a decade as rapidly accelerating, and there is an argument to be made that it has done so in advance of our collective ability to adequately detect, understand and respond with the cohesion and timeliness necessary. Red Queen Bio is confronting the problem with the technical depth and urgency of a technology company, while staying focused on the national security realities.”

About Red Queen Bio

Red Queen Bio PBC is an AI biosecurity company building next-generation technologies to help governments and communities respond to emerging biological threats. Founded by Nikolai Eroshenko and Hannu Rajaniemi, the company brings together advances in biology and artificial intelligence to create faster, more adaptive approaches to biosecurity and preparedness. Red Queen Bio is headquartered in Boston and is backed by OpenAI, Cerberus Ventures and others. For more information, please visit www.redqueen.bio.

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press@redqueen.bio

 

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Eventus’ Validus platform named Best AI Solution for Trade Surveillance at the AI in Capital Markets Awards 2026

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AUSTIN, Texas and LONDON, Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Eventus, a leading provider of comprehensive, at-scale trade surveillance and financial risk solutions, today was named Best AI Solution for Trade Surveillance at the second annual AI in Capital Markets Awards hosted by A-Team Group. The award for the firm’s Validus platform recognizes the innovative nature of its Frank AI solution introduced last fall within Validus.

The award category honors the AI technology that best enhances market integrity by detecting anomalies, identifying potential misconduct, and ensuring compliance in real-time trade surveillance. The AI in Capital Markets Awards are overseen by an independent Advisory Board that collaborates with the A-Team Insight editors to determine the shortlist. Members of the financial markets community vote for the winners.

Eventus CEO Cameron Routh said: “Our Frank AI solution is purpose-built for compliance users, ensuring that they achieve repeatable, transparent results with enterprise-grade security for any regulatory inquiries or audits. Frank gives users a fast, reliable way to get a straight answer out of their surveillance data without having to write code or wait for their IT department. We’re grateful that clients are finding important use cases for Frank and that A-Team and the industry recognize its value. We’re just scratching the surface of what Frank will be able to do for firms going forward.”

A-Team Group said the AI in Capital Markets Awards 2026 honor the “standout solutions driving real, measurable value in trading, data management, RegTech and enterprise AI” and “celebrate the breakthrough applications of artificial intelligence that are transforming financial enterprise operations.” They are recognizing vendors “who move beyond AI hype to deliver scalable, secure and impactful solutions for capital markets participants worldwide.”

Eventus’ Frank AI answers plain language queries about behavioral insights, anomalies, trends and custom data correlations through a chat interface into Validus data. Users can interact on-demand with their real-time data. Frank converts simple conversational prompts into scheduled reports and alerts that support a firm’s supervisory program. Frank’s suite of AI tools and behavioral analytics – using deterministic AI and technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) – helps clients automate complex processes, improve accuracy, dramatically reduce alert noise and enhance operational efficiency, as well as identify nuanced patterns of misconduct more effectively.

Eventus has won 54 awards and honors for its best-in-class trade surveillance solution since 2018. Other recent wins for Eventus include: Market Surveillance Solution of the Year at the FOW Asia Pacific Awards, Best Trade Surveillance Solution at A-Team’s Capital Markets Technology Awards APAC and Trade Surveillance Product of the Year at the Risk Technology Awards.

About Eventus 

Eventus provides state-of-the-art, at-scale trade surveillance software across all lines of defense. Its powerful, award-winning Validus platform is easy to deploy, customize and operate across equities, options, futures, foreign exchange (FX), fixed income, digital asset and prediction/information markets. Validus is proven in the most complex, high-volume, and real time environments of Eventus’ rapidly growing client base, including tier-1 banks, broker-dealers, futures commission merchants (FCMs), proprietary trading groups, market centers, buy-side institutions, energy and commodity trading firms, and regulators. Clients rely on the platform, coupled with the firm’s responsive support and product development, to overcome their most pressing trade surveillance regulatory challenges. For more, visit www.eventus.com.

 

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Mapbox Launches 3D Live Navigation in Neue Klasse BMW Vehicles

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Never miss a turn with lane-level guidance showing surrounding vehicles and road context in an integrated, live 3D map view.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Mapbox today announced that its Mapbox 3D Live Navigation feature powers BMW Maps with driver assistance in Neue Klasse vehicles from BMW Group. In a market first, this navigation experience combines lane-level navigation and live detections from the vehicle’s advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) into the map itself, showing turn-by-turn directions in context with the road, surrounding vehicles, and 3D buildings.

Mapbox 3D Live Navigation brings lane-level guidance and driver assistance to BMW Neue Klasse vehicles.

Mapbox designed the system to be the easiest for drivers to follow, so they never miss a turn. With Mapbox 3D Live Navigation, drivers simply follow the Mapbox Magic Carpet, a lane-level path that highlights the route.

Traditional in-car systems are not capable of integrating route guidance with information about the vehicle and its surroundings. Mapbox 3D Live Navigation brings these elements together, helping drivers understand their next move without piecing together information from separate displays.

The Mapbox live map powers the experience and refreshes with daily map updates, ensuring navigation reflects changing road conditions.

“Our mission is to assist drivers and machines to never miss a turn. 3D Live Navigation is a major milestone on this journey,” says Peter Sirota, Mapbox CEO. “We provide location infrastructure to our customers and enable them to invent highly differentiated experiences on top of our live map. It’s rewarding to see how BMW has turned that foundation into an experience that is distinctly their own.”

Reimagining Navigation

The power and flexibility of the Mapbox Navigation SDK gave BMW Group full control to build a navigation experience tailor-made for the Panoramic iDrive in its Neue Klasse vehicles—delivering an intuitive experience unlike anything else on the market. The vehicle’s Central Display, Panoramic Vision Display, and 3D Head-Up display present the right information at precisely the right time in the driver’s field of view.

“An important step toward highly automated driving is the intelligent interaction between navigation and driver assistance. BMW Maps with driver assistance shows drivers how route guidance, environmental perception, and assistance functions work together. This provides better orientation when driver assistance is active—developed by the BMW Group in collaboration with Mapbox,” says Stephan Durach, Senior Vice President of Digital Services, Infotainment, and Connected Company at the BMW Group.

Inside Mapbox 3D Live Navigation

Mapbox 3D Live Navigation combines Mapbox’s automotive mapping, navigation, and real-time data capabilities. For BMW, the experience includes:

A dynamic, live 3D map. Lane geometry, road markings, crosswalks, and 3D buildings come together in a detailed view of the road, supported by Mapbox’s ongoing map updates that reflect new construction and road modifications.Lane-level Magic Carpet guidance. The vehicle is shown in its lane of travel, while Mapbox Magic Carpet highlights the path through the next maneuver, helping drivers see exactly where to go so they never miss a turn. When assisted driving features are active, Mapbox shows where the vehicle intends to go.Situational awareness. ADAS camera detections, such as pedestrians, road hazards, and other vehicles, appear directly on the 3D map alongside lane-keeping and collision warnings, connecting the digital view with the road ahead in real time.

To learn more about Mapbox 3D Live Navigation, visit Mapbox.com.

About Mapbox

Mapbox provides location infrastructure for AI. Developers use it to build intelligent apps, agents, and vehicles that understand the world. Mapbox SDKs and APIs for maps, search, and navigation power tens of thousands of applications.

Founded in 2013, Mapbox leads development of the modern geospatial stack. Trusted by automakers, logistics providers, retailers and app developers, Mapbox delivers scalable, highly customizable geospatial solutions that power billions of sophisticated location experiences worldwide. The platform is known for its built-in flexibility, elegant design, enterprise-grade security, strict data privacy and developer-first documentation.

The mission of Mapbox is to enable every team to build exceptional, location-aware applications that delight users, enhance operations and transform industries. Learn more at www.mapbox.com.

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How Behavioral Profiles Can Reduce Drop-Off and Sustain Weight Loss, Upcoming Webinar Hosted by Xtalks

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In this free webinar, learn how behavioral profiles can help identify adherence risk and support more personalized weight-management programs. The featured speakers will discuss how psychological factors, treatment beliefs and objective biometric data can help explain why some patients stay on therapy and others discontinue. Attendees will also explore how combining behavioral, biometric and social data can support earlier outreach and more sustained functional weight loss.

TORONTO, Oct. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Weight-loss medications work only while patients keep taking them. The real goal is staying on medication long enough to achieve meaningful, functional weight loss and sustain it. This webinar explores why that’s harder than it sounds: not for the clinical reasons often expected, but rather because of the beliefs and psychology, including the significance of volitional medication use in obesity, that predict who stays engaged and who drops off before seeing the long-term benefits.

For pharma professionals supporting an obesity portfolio, that gap is an important challenge to address. Clinical trials show sustained weight reduction of 15–22% over 72 weeks, but real-world discontinuation can be up to 67% within 12 months. Side effects, cost and access explain only part of that drop-off. Most support programs have no validated way to identify behavioral risk before it impacts success.

Psychological factors, such as confidence, doubt and treatment identity, are increasingly recognized as independent predictors of discontinuation. Underlying motivations and beliefs about treatment, whether rooted in appearance, day-to-day function or long-term health risk, differ from patient to patient. Left unaddressed, these differences can determine whether someone stays on treatment and reaches a functional, lasting outcome. Digital health technology can help keep people engaged and on track.

The featured speakers will discuss findings from a novel study of 1,056 US adults using a GLP-1/GIP medication for weight management, evaluated using the SPUR behavioral framework alongside validated belief and mental-health measures. They’ll introduce Kaitality™, Clinical ink‘s general wellness app, and show how connecting biometrics (weight, body composition and activity), sociometrics (social context and daily environment) and psychometrics (validated psychological drivers of adherence) can generate real-world evidence and support progress toward sustained functional quality weight loss goals.

Register for this webinar to learn how a behavioral profile can help identify adherence risk, personalize patient support and support sustained functional weight loss.

Join experts from Clinical ink, Christian Djurhuus, MD, PhD, EVP Disease Management, Chief Scientific Officer; Nicholas Alp, MD, PhD, FACC Chief Medical Officer; and Bob DiLuzio (Moderator), Senior Vice President, Disease Management, for the live webinar on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at 11am EDT (4pm CET / EU-Central).

For more information, or to register for this event, visit How Behavioral Profiles Can Reduce Drop-Off and Sustain Weight Loss.

ABOUT XTALKS

Xtalks – The Life Science Community™ empowers professionals across pharma, biotech, medtech, healthcare and research with the trusted knowledge and collaborative insights that move the industry forward. Powered by Honeycomb Worldwide Inc., Xtalks delivers news, feature articles, webinars, podcasts, videos, expert interviews, curated job opportunities and more designed to support informed decision-making in a fast-evolving sector.

Every year, thousands of professionals rely on Xtalks for timely intelligence, peer perspectives and industry thought leadership. Join our life science community to stay informed, connected and ready for what’s next.

To learn more about Xtalks, visit www.xtalks.com
For information about working with Xtalks to host your webinar, visit https://xtalks.com/partner-with-us/

Contact:
Soumya Shashikumar
Tel: +1 (416) 977-6555 x371
Email: skumar@xtalks.com

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