Aureka Biotechnologies Secures $10M Seed Funding to Build a Universal AI Model for Immune Drug Discovery

Text | Hu Xiangyun

Editor | Hai Ruojing

36Kr learned that Aureka Biotechnologies, an AI pharmaceutical company, has completed a multi-million-dollar seed round of financing, with investment from Tibet Xianfeng Qiyun Investment Advisory Co., Ltd. and NRL Capital. The funds will mainly be used for the development of Aureka's AI + high-throughput digital biotechnology large molecule drug discovery platform and other R&D purposes.

Aureka was founded in March 2023, focusing on protein design and immunotherapy discovery through AI and high-throughput digital biotechnology. Currently, its main focus is on the development of common immunotherapies such as bispecific antibodies, CAR-T, ADC, as well as difficult-to-drug targets like G-protein-coupled receptors. The founder, Wei-An Zhao, is a tenured full professor at the University of California, Irvine, and also a serial entrepreneur who was once listed in the MIT.Science and TechnologyComment》's Global "35 Innovators Under 35".

According to Zhao Wei'an, he often received inquiries from patients about medication needs in his previous scientific research work. However, the long-cycle nature of drug development meant that many patients left with regret. Taking bispecific antibody drugs as an example, the traditional development method mainly relies on trial and error based on experience, which has low throughput, a long cycle, and very few characterized molecules, resulting in a lower success rate.

The application of AI technology once gave the industry a glimpse of the possibility of shortening drug research and development, but another common problem is that experimental feedback is not as fast as natural language processing feedback, making it difficult for AI output to be verified and receive feedback on a large scale. "AI pharmaceutical companies do not have the ability to generate enough data for AI to learn and iterate. This is the core issue that the entire field needs to address."

Aureka's solution is to "create a new feedback mechanism" by building a general model in the field of immunotherapy or macromolecules, enabling generative AI to quickly receive feedback from high-throughput experiments, achieving data-driven dry-wet closed-loop intelligent immunotherapy discovery, thereby shortening the drug development cycle.

Currently, the company's core technology platform is a microfluidics-based single-cell screening platform, which features both high throughput and high content. A single screening experiment can generate data on the million-level scale, encompassing various types of information such as the drug's genetic sequence, corresponding functions, and cellular images when functions are activated. "This information can help AI perform extensive downstream modeling, with the entire throughput reaching millions of sequence data generated per month, forming an excellent complement to AI."

Relying on this technology, Aureka has screened more than 100 functional bispecific antibody molecules from millions of possibilities, and the collaboration pipeline for related projects has entered the preclinical stage.

In addition, Aureka has built two other platforms: a synthetic biology platform and an artificial intelligence technology platform. The former is a platform based on somatic hypermutation in yeast, with the main function of designing and optimizing affinity to generate high-quality sequences that simulate directed evolution in nature; the latter artificial intelligence technology platform integrates multimodal data generated from the previous two high-throughput functional screening and synthetic biology platforms to guide drug design and discovery.

It can be said that the three major technology platforms jointly form Aureka's current technological system, enabling the company to integrate AI technology into the drug research and development process from three dimensions: generative technology, predictive model building, and model self-evolution. "From an industry perspective, Aureka is able to provide better compound molecules, shorten the drug discovery process, and develop some targets that are either impossible or difficult to address in traditional drug discovery."

Wei'an Zhao further explained with an example that one of Aureka's partners has developed a series of novel bispecific antibody drugs targeting the tumor microenvironment's pH switch through this technological platform, which not only enhances the efficiency of these drugs but also reduces their toxicity. "In traditional drug screening, you cannot obtain drug molecules with such novel functions."

In terms of commercialization, Aureka currently focuses on two models: providing platform technical services and collaborating with pharmaceutical companies on joint pipeline projects. According to reports, Aureka has secured multiple pilot project orders from large multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Investor Perspective:

Dr. Wang Yunhai, Managing Partner of Tibet Xianfeng Qiyun Investment Advisory Co., Ltd., stated: "With the continuous development and integration of multidisciplinary technologies such as artificial intelligence, microfluidics, imaging, and synthetic biology, the efficiency of drug discovery is expected to achieve a leapfrog breakthrough. The Aureka team possesses a strong interdisciplinary background and international perspective, having established a high-throughput single B-cell functional screening platform and a synthetic biology protein rapid evolution platform. Combined with AI technology, they have formed a dry-wet closed loop for large molecule drug research and development, which has been preliminarily validated. We are very optimistic about Aureka's development prospects, with potential applications expanding into various fields such as large molecule drug R&D, peptide, enzyme, and other protein product development in the future."

Lin Xianghong, Founding Partner of NRL Capital, stated: "The biopharmaceutical industry has long faced challenges such as lengthy R&D cycles, high costs, high failure rates, and insufficient underlying innovation capabilities. Aureka aims to significantly increase the success rate of discovering clinical candidate drug molecules by integrating the world's most advanced AI computational tools with a unique wet-lab platform, thereby substantially lowering the barriers to drug development and addressing more unmet clinical needs. Relying on the years of technical expertise accumulated by Professor Wei-An Zhao and multiple top industry experts, the company’s professional team will continuously strive to achieve this long-term vision. As a newly established industry-finance integration fund management platform, NRL Capital combines investment and operational experience from top-tier investment institutions and industry leaders. We are highly confident in Aureka's future and look forward to collaborating further to contribute to the internationalization of innovative biopharmaceutical products."