Westlake CloudValley Therapeutics Secures Tens of Millions RMB in Series A Funding Led by Gaorong Capital

Investment Circle (ID: pedaily2012) reported on May 11 that Westlake Genetech. Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Westlake Genetech") recently announced the completion of its angel round financing, amounting to tens of millions of yuan, led byGaorong VenturesInvestment. The funds from this round of financing will primarily be used to accelerate the development of the company’s artificial intelligence technologies in the field of gene-editing therapies and to advance the establishment of its core R&D platform for CRISPR-based therapeutics.

Westlake Genetech, established in 2021, is a technology commercialization venture stemming from the laboratory of Dr. Lijia Ma at the School of Life Sciences, Westlake University. The company is headquartered in the Yunqi Town area of Xihu District, Hangzhou, where the Yunqi Campus of Westlake University is located. Westlake Genetech is dedicated to becoming the world’s first platform-based biopharmaceutical company to fully integrate artificial intelligence into the clinical application of gene-editing therapies. Driven by technological innovation, the company aims to enhance the druggability and development efficiency of gene-editing treatments, establish an AI-driven workflow paradigm across the entire CRISPR drug R&D process, and pioneer uncharted territories in the field of gene-editing therapy.

Focusing on gene-editing therapies, Westlake Genetech is developing cutting-edge technologies that iteratively integrate high-throughput biotech data generation with deep learning model construction, and has built AIdit, an original technology-driven platform for gene-editing therapy development, committed to establishing an end-to-end workflow for the implementation of artificial intelligence in the field of gene therapy.

In recent years, gene editing technology has attracted significant attention. Among these technologies, the third-generation gene editing tool—CRISPR technology—is known as the "genetic scissors." CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a special sequence in genomic DNA, originating from an adaptive immune system in bacteria that can identify viruses invading the bacteria and destroy them through key enzymes. When encountering viral invasion again, bacteria can recognize the virus based on stored fragments, cut the viral DNA, and render it ineffective. Scientists utilize this technology to efficiently and precisely edit specific target genes in the genomes of organisms, thereby helping to cure diseases. As a result, CRISPR has become the most popular gene editing technology worldwide.

Currently, the application of CRISPR technology in the therapeutic field still faces challenges related to safety and efficacy. By abstracting biomedical issues in the gene-editing process into computational biology problems, artificial intelligence technologies can be leveraged to facilitate the advancement of CRISPR technology.

Dr. Lijia Ma, founder of Westlake Cloud Valley, is the Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics at Westlake University. Dr. Ma received her Ph.D. from the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed her postdoctoral training at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology at the University of Chicago. She has long been engaged in large-scale genomic and transcriptomic research, having previouslyBGI GenomicsResponsible for multiple large-scale genomics research projects.

Westlake Genetech has assembled an interdisciplinary team spanning genomics, deep learning, cell biology, and immunology. The company is currently developing a series of deep learning models to optimize the application of artificial intelligence in key aspects of gene therapy.

Dr. Ma Lijia stated, “Life sciences are at a turning point, shifting from experimental science to a combination of experimental and data science. As a scientist with a dual background in biomedicine and data science, I am honored to be in this golden age of scientific and technological development. The three billion base pairs of the human genome are often compared to the genetic code. The mission of Westlake Genetech is to establish a new paradigm for biopharmaceutical development—Biotech + AI—to identify issues within this genetic code and correct them using gene-editing techniques. In the future, gene-editing drugs will undoubtedly become important guardians of human health, alongside traditional small-molecule and large-molecule drugs.”

A project lead at Gaorong Ventures stated, “Since its inception, CRISPR-based gene-editing technology has remained at the forefront and a focal point of biotechnology R&D. Scientists are eager to apply this ‘genetic magic scissors’ to disease treatment as soon as possible and have undertaken several forward-looking attempts. However, gene-editing technology is still relatively immature at this stage and is evolving rapidly alongside advancing scientific understanding. The prerequisite and key to the comprehensive entry of gene-editing technology into the field of disease treatment lies in how to rapidly and comprehensively optimize and enhance gene-editing systems. Artificial intelligence approaches based on biological big data provide precisely such a solution. The Westlake Genetech team has accumulated years of expertise in the generation and interpretation of high-throughput, high-precision, and high-dimensional biological big data. Recently, its AI platform, AIdit, has achieved breakthrough progress in optimizing critical steps of gene editing. We highly anticipate that, under the leadership of Dr. Lijia Ma, the Westlake Genetech team will leverage artificial intelligence to comprehensively optimize gene-editing technology across all aspects and throughout the entire workflow, thereby accelerating the translation of R&D achievements into the field of disease treatment.”