METiS Pharmaceuticals Secures $100M Series C Led by CICC, Advances AI-Driven Drug Delivery Platforms

On June 21, AI pharmaceutical company METiS TechBio announced the completion of a $100 million Series C financing round.

This round of financing was led by a fund under CICC Capital, with follow-up investment from the Hong Kong Insurance Technology Innovation Fund under China Taiping.

Source of the image: Official WeChat account of METiS TechBio

Including previous investments from top-tier institutions such as Sequoia China, Guoshou Equity, PICC Equity, 5Y Capital, Frees Fund, Source Code Capital, Lightspeed Fusion, and Lattice Capital, METiS TechBio has cumulatively raised nearly 300 million US dollars in financing.

The funds from this round of financing will also be mainly used to continue advancing the construction of the AI + drug delivery platform and the development of self-research pipelines, supporting METiS TechBio in continuously innovating in the field of drug delivery.

Focus on AI + Drug Delivery

METiS TechBio was founded in 2020 by Dr. Caida Lai, Dr. Wenshou Wang, and Academician Hongmin Chen, primarily focusing on drug delivery, drug discovery, with an emphasis on nucleic acid drugs.

The founding team of METiS TechBio all come from MIT. The CEO, Cai-Da Lai, holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT. During his Ph.D., he served as a researcher at the Novartis-MIT Center, where he worked on drug crystal form process research using computational models and big data. He also founded an AI + IoT company.

Chief Operating Officer Wang Wen is a scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. During his postdoctoral period, he mainly studied the synthesis of polymer biomaterials and their applications in medical devices and drug controlled release, and co-founded a high-precision 3D printing company based on machine learning.

Chen Hongmin, Head of the R&D Department, is an expert in drug formulation development and delivery. During her Ph.D. studies at MIT, she was mentored by Dr. Robert Langer, a member of the three U.S. National Academies and a pioneer in controlled drug release. Previously, she served as the Director of Formulation R&D at TransForm Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Johnson & Johnson), where she developed a high-throughput formulation technology platform.

Currently, METiS TechBio has independently developed three major AI+ core technology platforms:

AI-Driven Nucleic Acid Delivery System Design Platform (AiLNP): A self-developed library of over ten thousand cationic lipids and an LNP delivery system with independent intellectual property rights, demonstrating expression efficiency more than ten times higher than industry standards.

AI-Driven mRNA Sequence Design Platform (AiRNA): Utilizing quantum chemistry and machine learning algorithms, combined with the biological and physicochemical properties of nucleic acids, to design the full-length mRNA sequence space at scale, build an mRNA synthesis and purification platform, and achieve rapid mRNA production.

AI-Driven Small Molecule Formulation Design Platform (AiTEM): Scalable design of formulation prescription space, capable of generating tens of thousands of prescriptions per week, and obtaining the optimal prescription solution within one month.

Image Source: METiS TechBio Official WeChat

In terms of drug pipelines, they mainly include small-molecule drugs and nucleic acid drugs based on mRNA, with indications covering multiple disease areas.

Editor: Bai Ji

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