Hong Kong AI biotech firm Insilico Medicine raises US$255 million in funding round led by Warburg Pincus
- Insilico has raised more than US$310 million from expert pharmaceutical and technology investors since its inception in 2014
- Qiming Venture Partners, Eight Roads, Lilly Asia Ventures, Baidu Ventures and Sequoia Capital China among investors joining latest funding round
Proceeds from the latest funding round will be used to progress Insilico’s therapeutic programs into human clinical trials, the company said. The funds will also be used for initiating several new programs for novel and difficult targets, and to further develop the company’s AI and drug discovery capabilities.
“The AI technologies we invented are now demonstrating impressive results in both biology and chemistry, delivering valuable and absolutely novel therapeutic assets with high probability of clinical success,” said Alex Zhavoronkov, Insilico’s founder and CEO.
“With their support, we will continue to innovate and bring revolutionary solutions to the pharmaceutical industry,” Zhavoronkov said.
Min Fang, a managing director at Warburg Pincus, will join Insilico’s board of directors. AI and machine learning are powerful tools that will revolutionise the drug discovery process and “bring life-changing therapies to patients faster than ever before”, Fred Hassan, former chairman and CEO of US pharmaceutical firm Schering Plough, said on behalf of Warburg Pincus.
“Insilico fits strongly with our strategy of investing in best-in-class innovators in health care, and we will continue to support the company’s ambitious vision of transforming drug discovery through harnessing AI and machine learning,” he said.
In a research paper on fibrosis published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Biotechnology in September 2019, Insilico showed it could pick six novel drug compounds from thousands generated and conduct preclinical tests on them as potential drug candidates for the disease in less than 50 days.
In January last year, it struck a deal with Pfizer that will see the US pharmaceutical giant use Insilico’s drugs discovery technology.
Insilico has also exclusively partnered with Syngenta, the Swiss agrichemicals giant owned by state-backed ChemChina, for the discovery of novel molecules for sustainable regenerative farming.
The company introduced a AI software platform called Chemistry42 in September last year to support a number of pharmaceutical firms with drug design. Insilico has also assembled a drug discovery team and platform in China, and started several therapeutic programmes targeting novel, difficult and previously “undruggable” targets.
