Warburg Pincus leads Series C for China AI drug developer

Existing backers Qiming Venture Partners, Pavilion Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, Lilly Asia Ventures, Sinovation Ventures, Bold Capital Partners, Formic Ventures, Baidu Ventures re-upped.

There are also a host of new investors, among them CPE, OrbiMed, Mirae Asset Capital, B Capital Group, Deerfield Management, Maison Capital, Lake Bleu Capital, President International Development Corporation, Sequoia Capital China, and Sage Partners, according to a statement.

The fresh capital will be used to push Insilico's current therapeutic programs into human clinical trials, initiate new programs for novel and difficult targets, and develop the company's AI and drug discovery capabilities.

Insilico was founded in the US in 2014 and relocated its headquarters to Hong Kong in 2019, citing the importance of the China market. It has now raised more than $310 million in funding, including a $37 million Series B led by Qiming in 2019.

Insilico's technology is based on GAN, or a generative adversarial network. It comprises two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The former creates a fake signal to fool the latter, and the latter spots the difference between real and fake signals. It amounts to a highly effective authentication mechanism.

When combined with another AI technology – reinforcement learning, which uses a reward-based system to help machines find the best possible behavior or path, GAN can imagine new molecules. Insilico's breakthrough came when the system took 46 days to generate molecules that could be used to disrupt the spread of certain cancers. This kind of process normally takes up to a year.

Since then, it has taken a novel target for a major pulmonary disease from AI-enabled identification through nomination as a pre-clinical candidate in under 18 months.

In addition to developing its own pipeline of drugs, Insilico provides drug discovery services and software to third-party customers. The company has collaborated with the likes of Pfizer, Astellas, Johnson & Johnson, and Taisho, as well as partnering with Syngenta on the discovery of novel molecules for sustainable regenerative farming.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• Healthcare
• China
• Pharmaceuticals
• artificial intelligence
• Warburg Pincus Asia
• Qiming Venture Partners
• Eight Roads
• Lilly Asia Ventures
• Sinovation Ventures
• Baidu