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.
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.”
(Source: Insilico Medicine)
Filed Under: Drug Discovery
