China's Insilico Medicine gets $60m Series D
Insilico Medicine, a China-based artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, has raised a USD 60 million Series D round.
New investors included an unnamed diversified asset management firm on the US West Coast and BHR Partners.
There were re-ups from the likes of Warburg Pincus, B Capital Group, Qiming Venture Partners, Bold Capital Partners and Pavilion Capital, according to a statement. Alex Zhavoronkov, Insilico's founder and CEO, also participated.
The proceeds will support the company's drug development pipeline and advance its Pharma.AI platform, which is intended to speed up drug discovery while reducing the overall cost.
Insilico's lead program - and the first developed internally - is a treatment for fibrosis, which has completed in-human microdose studies and entered phase-one clinical trials. Seven more internal candidates have progressed to the investigational dew drug (IND) stage, including one treatment for COVID-19 and two for cancer.
The company was founded in the US in 2014 and relocated its headquarters to Hong Kong in 2019, citing the importance of the China market. It raised a USD 37m Series B led by Qiming in 2019 and a USD 255m Series C led by Warburg Pincus last year.
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 behaviour 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.
The goal is to build a fully automated, AI-driven robotic drug discovery laboratory, and a fully robotic biological data factory.
Insilico claims that nine of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies globally use its AI platform. Earlier this year, it signed a multi-asset partnership deal with Fosun Pharma and a drug discovery co-development deal with EQRx. Less than 40 days after launching the Fosun Pharma partnership, Insilico had nominated a preclinical candidate for cancer immunotherapy.
"Despite unprecedented market conditions in the biotechnology sector, we raised this Series D round from several of the most reputable US-based and global investors," said Zhavoronkov.
"It is a testament to the strength of our end-to-end AI platform, which has been validated by many partners, and produced our first novel antifibrotic program discovered using AI and ageing research, and designed using our generative AI chemistry engine."
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