WuXi AppTec Leads Strategic Investment in Insilico Medicine to Accelerate Drug Discovery Using Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence

PR Newswire

BALTIMORE and SHANGHAI, June 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Insilico Medicine, a Baltimore-based next-generation artificial intelligence company specialized in the application of deep learning for target identification, drug discovery and aging research, announces the completion of a strategic round of funding led by WuXi AppTec's Corporate Venture Fund. The strategic investment was conditional upon the successful experimental validation of Insilico Medicine's Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based drug discovery pipeline and is intended to closely integrate Insilico Medicine's cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with WuXi AppTec's laboratory infrastructure and expertise in drug discovery.

The round was led by WuXi AppTec's Corporate Venture Fund and includes Pavilion Capital, a subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, and BOLD Capital Partners, the venture capital fund investing in exponential technologies co-founded by Peter Diamandis. Juvenescence, a leading longevity therapeutics company focused on the diseases of ageing, with a partnership with Insilico Medicine on drug discovery, also participated in the financing.

"WuXi AppTec is a leading global pharmaceutical and technology platform company and it has been a privilege to work hand-in-hand with WuXi AppTec's world-class chemists and biologists, who routinely solve some of the most complex challenges presented by the global pharmaceutical industry," said Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. "We are fortunate to partner with WuXi AppTec and a consortium of internationally renowned investors with deep domain expertise both in drug discovery and artificial intelligence, validating our approach and supporting our vision."

The funding is intended to enhance Insilico Medicine's work in the innovative approaches to the generation of novel molecules using a variety of machine learning and deep learning techniques, as well as to expand a variety of the biomarker discovery initiatives.

"WuXi AppTec and Insilico Medicine share a mutual vision that artificial intelligence and machine learning will optimize the drug discovery process by increasing the probability of success at the pre-clinical level," said Dr. Ge Li, Chairman of WuXi AppTec Group. "Insilico Medicine's domain expertise in next-generation artificial intelligence, coupled with WuXi AppTec's capability platform, can potentially improve the efficiency of drug discovery and increase the productivity to serve our partners."

The transaction has been a joint effort between WuXi AppTec's Corporate Venture Fund and WuXi AppTec's Research Services Division, which has been focused on investing in and collaborating with highly-disruptive technologies and companies globally.

"With the investment in Insilico Medicine, we are now taking our partnership to the next level by establishing a closer integration within WuXi AppTec's own research capabilities to better serve the biopharmaceutical industry," said Mr. Edward Hu, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Investment Officer of WuXi AppTec. "We have been looking to collaborate with artificial intelligence-enabled technologies to enhance the drug discovery and development process. What impressed us the most about Insilico Medicine was the breadth of its technological capabilities and applications, ranging from target identification and small molecule generation using next-generation artificial intelligence to expertise in blockchain and aging research."

About WuXi AppTec
WuXi AppTec (603259, SH) is a leading global pharmaceutical and medical device open-access capability and technology platform company with global operations. As an innovation-driven and customer-focused company, WuXi AppTec provides a broad and integrated portfolio of services to help our worldwide customers and partners shorten the discovery and development time and lower the cost of drug and medical device R&D through cost-effective and efficient solutions. With its industry-leading capabilities such as small molecule R&D and manufacturing, cell therapy and gene therapy R&D and manufacturing, and medical device testing, WuXi AppTec is committed to enabling innovative collaborators to bring innovative healthcare products to patients, and to fulfilling WuXi's dream that "every drug can be made and every disease can be treated."

Pavilion Capital
Pavilion Capital, an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings, is a Singapore-based investment firm which is focused on private equity investments in North Asia.

About BOLD Capital Partners
BOLD Capital Partners ("BOLD"), is a venture capital firm targeting investments in early stage and growth technology companies. BOLD is particularly interested in entrepreneurial leaders that leverage exponential technologies to transform the world and create innovative solutions to humanities' grand challenges. The investment platform leverages the resources of Singularity University and the Peter Diamandis ecosystem to actively seek and support world-class entrepreneurs. BOLD has offices in Santa Monica and Palo Alto, California.

About Juvenescence Limited
Juvenescence Limited is a biotech company focused on therapies to increase healthy human longevity. It was founded in 2017 by Jim Mellon, Dr. Greg Bailey, Dr. Declan Doogan, Anthony Chow, and Alexander Pickett. The Juvenescence team are highly experienced drug developers, and serial entrepreneurs with a track record of success in life sciences and drug development. Juvenescence is focused on developing therapeutics that alter ageing or age-related diseases.

Juvenescence believes that recent advances in science have greatly improved our understanding of the biology of ageing and creates the opportunity to develop therapeutics now that can slow, halt or potentially reverse elements of ageing.

About Insilico Medicine
Insilico Medicine is an artificial intelligence company headquartered at the Emerging Technology Centers at the Johns Hopkins University Eastern campus in Baltimore, with R&D and management resources in Belgium, Russia, UK, Taiwan and Korea sourced through hackathons and competitions. The company and its scientists is dedicated to extending human productive longevity and transforming every step of the drug discovery and drug development process through excellence in biomarker discovery, drug development, digital medicine and aging research. Insilico Medicine's work was recently covered by MIT Technology Review China, Nature Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, The Pharmaceutical Journal and many others. The Company is routinely publishing advanced research in peer-reviewed journals and presenting at the major industry conferences.

Insilico Medicine pioneered the applications of the generative adversarial networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning for generation of novel molecular structures for the diseases with a known target and with no known targets. In addition to working collaborations with the large pharmaceutical companies, the company is pursuing internal drug discovery programs in cancer, dermatological diseases, fibrosis, Parkinson's Disease, Alzheimer's Disease, ALS, diabetes, sarcopenia, and aging. Through a partnership with LifeExtension.com the company launched a range of nutraceutical products compounded using the advanced bioinformatics techniques and deep learning approaches. It also provides a range of consumer-facing applications including Young.AI.

In 2017, NVIDIA selected Insilico Medicine as one of the Top 5 AI companies in its potential for social impact. In 2018, the company was named one of the global top 100 AI companies by CB Insights. For more information on Insilico Medicine, please visit http://insilico.com.

Media Contacts:

WuXi AppTec
Gracie Rong[email protected]

Insilico Medicine
Qingsong Zhu[email protected]

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