China Market Insider How AI is Revolutionizing the Pharmaceutical Industry in China

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Artificial intelligence start-ups have begun to revolutionize the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. With the help of algorithms and ‘Big Data,’ the development time for new drugs is being radically reduced, in some cases from ten to 15 years to just one to one and a half years. The Chinese start-ups with the best prospects are currently being showered with billions of dollars in investment. The general technological trend fueling this development is called bio convergence.

Beijing/China – Startup BioMap, founded by Robin Li, who also founded China's search engine group Baidu or Hong Kong-based Insilico, has already raised several hundred million dollars in investor money this year. "The AI pharmaceutical segment is currently triggering high expectations among capital providers," writes Chinese tech portal 36kr. AI startup XtalPi, based in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, has also received a large investment, including from ‘China Biopharmaceutical Group.’ And multinational pharmaceutical companies such as Merck from Darmstadt, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, or Johnson & Johnson are also increasingly focusing on collaborations with AI startups for their drug pipelines.

In China, this trend is developing particularly fast at the moment. In 2020, Pfizer started to use Insilico's algorithms to sift through large data sets to identify new targets or sites of action for drugs (drug targets). In the same year, the fast-growing Hong Kong-based startup announced that Merck in Darmstadt was the first pharmaceutical multinational to use its AI platform ‘Chemistry42’ on its computers to search for new therapeutic agents. Since then, and in the new year, Insilico has constantly announced new projects and collaborations, including joint drug research with Teva, with the protein degradation-focused company Arvinas, and PAQ Therapeutics.

Generation AI-First – Data-Driven R&D

"Insilico's growth in China is exceeding even ambitious expectations, as they sign new partnership deals almost every two weeks," writes trade portal Biopharma Trend. The company belongs to a new ‘species’ of pharmaceutical companies that the industry calls ‘AI First.’ This means that they have started developing Artificial Intelligence and are now shaking up R&D in, for example, pharmaceutical oncology. They are ‘data-driven’ and often approach research tasks in a completely different way than biotech companies that were initially founded as ‘wet lab’ companies.

Insilico uses a particular group of algorithms in drug discovery called GAN, or "Generative Adversarial Networks." With unprecedented speed, these can be used to evaluate giant data sets to make accurate predictions about the uptake and effects of new drugs or parameters such as metabolism, toxicity, and side effects. In this way, the success rate for clinical trials can be increased, while the total time for R&D and the necessary investments can be significantly reduced.

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Is Bio Convergence the Future?

The best-known international example of such successes in the new ‘era of AI pharmaceuticals’ is Moderna, which developed its Corona vaccine in record time with the help of artificial intelligence. What is less well known is that Chinese startups are also at the forefront of this disruptive technology. While the U.S. still dominates the global market for new medicines with over 50 %, there is probably nowhere in the world which is more active in the startup ecosystem than in China.

AI pharma is just one fascinating part of a much larger ‘bio convergence’ trend that is currently revolutionizing the pharma industry in China and the entire healthcare system and life sciences. Interdisciplinary approaches bring researchers and engineers from different scientific fields and industries to the table to solve problems. Biology, AI, electronics, materials science, and other areas are ideally added together in these projects to create something more significant than the sum of their parts.

At its core, bio convergence is always about learning from nature or imitating or simulating natural processes. Chinese startups such as Da Xiang in Beijing, which manufactures OOC or ‘Organs-on-Chip,’ have benefited from this approach alongside shooting stars in AI pharmaceutical research. A human organ's functions are imitated on a semiconductor in a liquid environment, such as the brain, liver, or lungs. The ‘in silico experiments’ were then undertaken to replace much of what had to be done ‘in vivo’ or ‘in vitro’ in conventional drug research. Read more how to improve multivariant production processes with AI in our recent white paper.

* Henrik Bork, former China correspondent of the German Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau, is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a Beijing-based consulting agency. ‘China Market Insider’ is a joint project of the Vogel Communications Group, Würzburg, and Jigong Vogel Media Advertising in Beijing.

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