This week the hard part was making things. ASML said its planned expansion will fall short of what chipmakers want to buy, and a turbopump fault cost Ariane 6 seven weeks.
Some fixes were procedural. EMA backed a pancreatic cancer drug in under 150 days by reviewing it in pieces, and ASML took a module back in house after more than a decade of trying to outsource it.
Lead
ASML Says Its Expansion Plan Is Already Too Small
ASML is looking for production capacity beyond 2028, on top of the 30 per cent it plans to add in 2027 and another 30 per cent in 2028 for low-NA EUV and DUV immersion scanners. CEO Christophe Fouquet told analysts on 14 October that customers expect chip capacity to fall short of demand until at least 2028, and some want to place orders for 2029 and 2030.
Third-quarter revenue was a record EUR 11.7 billion, with EUR 5 billion in net income. ASML expects EUR 44 to 45 billion for 2026, about 36 per cent up on last year.
Suppliers are now the constraint. Fouquet said some parts of the supply chain will need "help" to keep up, while the NXE:3800F, arriving in small numbers in 2027, lifts throughput from 230 to 260 wafers an hour.
Biotech & Life Sciences
EMA Backs a Pancreatic Cancer Drug in Under 150 Days
EMA's human medicines committee recommended approval of Rasonque (daraxonrasib) on 15 October for adults with metastatic pancreatic cancer after earlier treatment. Revolution Medicines' oral RAS inhibitor extended median survival to 12.4 months, against 6.7 months on chemotherapy, in a 500-patient Phase 3.
EMA reviewed the data in phases as it arrived, starting in July, before the full application was filed. Assessment took under 150 days; a standard review can run 210 active days and usually takes about a year.
EMA says the case will shape phased reviews under the new EU pharmaceutical law. Pricing still goes country by country, and that is where access often slows again.
(EMA)
Undecimal Bio Raises $18 Million to Get RNA Drugs Past the Liver
Undecimal Bio, a spin-out of Eleven Therapeutics with labs at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and a team in Tel Aviv, raised an $18 million seed round on 13 October. 4BIO Capital and IQ Capital co-led.
siRNA drugs work well in the liver because that is where they naturally end up. Undecimal screens large libraries of candidate ligands, using cells as sensors and AI to read the results, to find conjugates that carry siRNA to other cell types.
Its first target is renovascular disease. It names no lead candidate or clinical date, and its big pharma collaborations remain undisclosed.
Quantum & Photonics
D-Wave Brings Italy Its First Quantum Annealer
D-Wave has delivered an Advantage2 annealer with more than 4,400 qubits to Villa Saporiti in Como, with inauguration set for today. Swiss Quantum Technology paid for it under a EUR 10 million agreement, and the system will be open to Italian researchers and companies through D-Wave's cloud.
Annealers handle optimisation problems and cannot run general quantum algorithms. Italy gains hands-on access years before gate-based machines are useful, but from an American vendor.
Riverlane Retrains Its Decoder in Seconds on a GPU
Riverlane and NVIDIA reported on 15 October that training Riverlane's surface-code decoder on an H100 GPU took 2.8 seconds, against three minutes on a single CPU core. The GPU processed more than four million error syndromes a second.
Qubits drift, so decoders must be recalibrated often. A single CPU core is a modest baseline, but recalibrating in seconds means a machine can stay tuned while it runs.
Space
A Turbopump Fault Costs Ariane 6 Seven Weeks
Arianespace said on 14 October that Ariane 6 will return to flight no earlier than 23 November, carrying 36 Amazon Leo satellites on an Ariane 64. The flight was pencilled in for 7 October before a liquid hydrogen turbopump problem surfaced in engine acceptance testing.
La Tribune reported the fix a day earlier; ArianeGroup declined to comment on the report. The year now ends at six launches against seven or eight planned, with MetOp-SG-B1 last.
Arianespace still targets nine to ten flights in 2027. Hitting that means building engines faster than it managed this year.
Materials & Manufacturing
ASML Takes Back the Module It Could Not Outsource
In 2012 ASML handed full responsibility for its wafer handler to VDL ETG, and about 120 engineers moved to VDL's site in Acht. Bits&Chips reported on 13 October that the arrangement has ended and ASML has taken control back.
The interface was the problem: the handler talks to many other modules, and nobody managed to untangle it. Rewriting its software to make it truly separable was estimated at 600 person-years.
"We gave them an impossible assignment," said ASML sourcing director Manon Hendriks. The lesson for Europe's push to grow suppliers is that a module tangled into the machine cannot be handed off the way Zeiss optics or Trumpf lasers can.
Robotics & Automation
Poland Courts Taiwanese Robot Makers
Poland's government has started talks with Taiwan's electrical and electronics manufacturers' association about robot makers building in Poland, Rzeczpospolita reported on 16 October. Deputy minister Michał Jaros called Foxconn, which plans a plant at Miękinia near Wrocław, "a big opportunity" for others to follow.
Poland has 86 industrial robots per 10,000 workers, against an EU average of 231. xBerry's chief executive Marek Stojecki argued Polish firms should compete on integration and servicing, since price competition with Asian hardware makers rarely pays.
One to Watch
Italy Wants a Satellite With Adjustable Gravity
The Italian Space Agency (ASI) announced on 8 October that it is studying a satellite that generates artificial gravity, from microgravity to Moon and Mars levels, for long experiments a few CubeSat units in size. It opens a consultation with researchers later this month.
DLR's Eu:CROPIS spun to similar levels in 2018, but a software fault kept its greenhouses off. Watch whether ASI's consultation produces users willing to pay, and whether the idea reaches ESA's ministers in Rome in December.