Helixon Secures Nearly RMB 500 Million Series A Funding to Advance AI-Driven Macromolecular Drug Discovery

36Kr learned that an AI-based new drug development companyHelixon Completes Nearly 500 Million Yuan in Series A FinancingThis round of financing was led by Morningside Ventures, with participation from Gaorong Ventures, Neumann Capital, and the three angel round investors: Xianghe Business Consulting (Beijing) Co., Ltd., GL Ventures, and Beijing Qingzhi Innovation Management Consulting Co., Ltd.HelixonWill continue to focus on the AI + new drug development field, expand the team and business development, enhance AI high-performance computing capabilities, expand high-throughput experimental platforms, and simultaneously advance pipeline self-research and external cooperation.

Helixon was founded in June 2021.Focusing on building a new generation of artificial intelligence scientific computing platform, and combining self-developed high-throughput biological experimental technology to provide drug researchers with an intelligent system for molecular computing, simulation, and design in the microscopic world.。

The company's teams are mainly distributed in various locations such as Changping Life Science Park in Beijing, Haidian Zhongguan Village, and the Yangtze River Delta region. It is reported that the development directions of the laboratory team in the Life Science Park include macromolecular structure and function prediction, antibody design and development, T-cell immunotherapy, etc.

Public information shows that Helixon's AI drug development platform is a new-generation macromolecular structure modeling computational platform driven by large-scale geometric deep learning algorithms, based on extensive public and private protein structure and complex structure data. This platform includes a series of algorithms and application scenarios such as protein structure prediction, protein and antibody function prediction, critical region modeling for macromolecular drugs, and protein sequence design.

The high-throughput antibody engineering experimental platform undertakes tasks including flow cytometry analysis, sorting, antibody library construction and screening, evaluation of antibody binding activity and neutralizing activity, and more. In addition, Helixon will further develop a high-throughput computational and experimental integrated platform for AI-designed macromolecule synthesis, screening, and functional verification. This platform features capabilities such as high-throughput B-cell analysis and sorting, protein purification, high-throughput antibody synthesis, and activity assessment, and will be deeply integrated with the artificial intelligence computing platform to develop pipelines in the fields of viral infections and oncology.

As of now,The company has developed various innovative algorithms for protein drug design and modeling, integrating them with high-throughput experimental platforms to complete high-efficiency iterations of AI design/experimental validation.。As the platform technology gradually improves, Helixon has begun to layout multiple large molecule and immunotherapy R&D pipelines, with the expectation of rapidly advancing to the clinical stage.。

In recent years, the development of large-molecule drugs based on AI has become an important trend, with the key technical prerequisite being AI's ability to predict protein structures and interactions.

Proteins are not only a class of nutrients, but also certain proteins with special structures hold immense significance in pharmaceutical and medical fields. Traditional methods for discovering these special proteins take years and come with high trial-and-error costs.After years of research, academia and industry have reached a consensus: deep learning significantly improves protein structure prediction, enabling the accurate prediction of the general three-dimensional shapes of most proteins.The introduction of AlphaFold2's Transformer model and end-to-end training in 2021 has further elevated the accuracy of this task, drawing widespread attention from investors.Advances in Artificial Intelligence in the Field of Large Molecule Drug Discovery.

It is reported that Peng Jian, the founder of the company and also the founder of Helixon, is a tenured professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the United States and a senior visiting professor at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR). Over the past decade, he has conducted in-depth research on machine learning, protein structure, and function prediction. In 2016, he received the Sloan Research Fellowship, often regarded as a precursor to the Nobel Prize, and in 2020, he was awarded the Overton Prize, the highest honor in computational biology. His main research areas include bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and machine learning. Algorithms co-developed by him have achieved outstanding results in several scientific challenges, including the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) and the DREAM Challenges in translational medicine and pharmacogenomics.