AliveX Biotech Files IPO Prospectus: Pioneering AI-Driven Systems Immunology for Clinical Applications with Collaborations Across 26 Medical Institutions Within 18 Months

Unlike many biopharma entrepreneurs who come from biomedical backgrounds, Wen Wen boasts extensive cross-industry experience. After graduating from the Department of Financial Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), she joined CITIC Capital as a hedge fund investment manager, where she delivered outstanding investment performance by identifying multiple companies that achieved tenfold or even hundredfold returns. In an interview with VCBeat, Wen Wen stated that the most profound insight she gained as an investor was witnessing firsthand, time and again, how innovative technologies disrupt traditional industries. She emphasized that the key to successful investing lies in the ability to identify such disruption and value creation ahead of the curve.

Before founding AliveX Biotech, Wen Wen chose to transition from a witness of technological innovation to an active participant. As the Director of Innovative Products at an internet finance company, she developed innovative platforms and worked with her team to bring numerous new products from concept to reality, leveraging artificial intelligence and big data technologies to revolutionize traditional business models.

Growing up in a family where her father was long engaged in hospital management and her mother focused on oncology pharmacology research, healthcare was both an immersive environment for Wen Wen’s upbringing and an inevitable topic of family discussion. Coupled with her years of experience as an investor in the healthcare sector, Wen Wen has a deeper understanding and more profound insights into the achievements and pain points of China’s healthcare industry than many others.

Wen Wen observed that both academic and entrepreneurial teams in China have long played the role of followers in the life sciences sector. Even innovative projects that successfully secured financing were deemed commercially viable by investors primarily because they adopted established models such as “me-too,” “me-better,” or import substitution. She aims to leverage cutting-edge global technologies to develop applications that address unmet clinical needs, thereby achieving true global leadership in frontier innovation and sustainably creating superior value. Standing alongside her at that time was Zhang Hao, an Oxford University PhD in immunology and former Global Marketing Director (Cancer Immunotherapy) at Roche Pharmaceuticals.

“AI + Systems Immunology” is a direction that not only satisfies Wenwen’s technological aspirations but also aligns with Dr. Zhang Hao’s technical expertise. In the exploration of AI applications, the world is just getting started, and Wenwen believes there are ample opportunities for leapfrog development.

With the continuous advancement of biomedicine, there is a growing and profound understanding of the immune system—the body’s innate and ever-evolving defense mechanism. Furthermore, as precision medicine progresses from conceptualization to clinical trials and ultimately to clinical application, the significance of the highly individualized immune system has become increasingly prominent. Globally renowned pharmaceutical companies and emerging innovative biotech firms in China are all attempting to address complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune disorders, infectious diseases, and neurological conditions from an immunological perspective. Given the exceptionally high professional barriers in immunology and the extreme complexity of its datasets, the integration of artificial intelligence—with its efficient computational and interactive capabilities—holds significant promise for enhancing independent research and development and facilitating the translation of scientific achievements.

In January 2019, AliveX Biotech was established as the first company in China to focus on the clinical application of innovative “AI + Systems Immunology.” The company boasts an impressive advisory and expert team comprising academicians in immunology and oncology from both China and abroad, presidents of Grade-A tertiary hospitals, and several renowned clinical experts. Dr. Hou Xiaoqiang, another co-founder of the company, previously served as the head of scientific research and teaching at the Army General Hospital. He has long been engaged in research on pathogenic microorganism diagnosis, pathogenesis and vaccine development, precision testing for major diseases such as tumors and rare diseases, and immune therapy-related technologies.

Three individuals rapidly established the functional team at AliveX Biotech, comprising senior executives from renowned companies such as Roche Diagnostics, AstraZeneca, Intel Smart Health, PayPal, and Baidu, who oversee technology, scientific affairs, clinical laboratory R&D, finance, and other operations. Under the guidance of this expert team, a leading domestic immune big data platform was promptly built.

Wen Wen pointed out that immune data serving precision medicine should include multi-omics data such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and epigenomics, along with multidimensional data like clinical case records. To build an immune big data platform, the AliveX Biotech team integrated 28 public scientific research databases and the results of web crawling and data cleaning from 538,482 publications, gradually forming a knowledge graph encompassing all known immune-related genes, proteins, cells, pathways, diseases, and symptoms. This approach systematically constructs the relationships between the immune system and diseases, as well as the interactions between the immune system and other biological systems, while enabling seamless integration with public databases.

This knowledge graph corresponds to a vast amount of human biological data: each individual’s genome comprises three billion base pairs, complemented by tens of millions of data points from proteomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics. “Processing data at this scale and identifying relationships among multiple variables and parameters has surpassed the limits of the human brain,” said Wen Wen. AI can mine potential correlations and patterns from ultra-high-dimensional, sparse multi-omics data, thereby providing a comprehensive assessment of the human immune status and discovering novel approaches for disease diagnosis, nursing care, and treatment.

Leveraging small-sample heuristic learning and algorithm optimization grounded in systems immunology, and integrating immunological prior knowledge with expert reasoning frameworks, AliveX Biotech has constructed an automated machine learning platform for systems immunology using AI neural networks. Wen Wen told VCBeat that this machine learning platform can automatically select the optimal models and parameters for different scientific questions, apply state-of-the-art feature engineering methods according to various scenarios, and achieve automatic iteration.

“By integrating the immune big data platform with the machine learning platform, we can more rapidly identify intrinsic disease associations and potential biomarkers, thereby advancing disease screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and accelerating the research and development of new drugs and diagnostic methods,” stated Wen Wen. AliveX Biotech is collaborating with 26 hospitals—including Tsinghua University, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, Peking University People’s Hospital, and The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University—through key industry-academia-research projects and partnerships with academic organizations, aggregating over 50,000 clinical datasets.

Meanwhile, AliveX Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are progressively rolling out collaborative projects, including clinical trials, joint R&D, and data analysis services for colorectal cancer, hematologic malignancies, lung cancer, and other indications.

According to Wen Wen, at this stage, AliveX Biotech primarily leverages “AI + Systems Immunology” technology to provide AI-empowered scientific research services and collaborative R&D to medical institutions and biotechnology companies engaged in innovative drug development. Meanwhile, the company is actively building its proprietary pipeline of diagnostic products based on AI and immunology.

Specifically, AliveX Biotech primarily provides testing services, data collection and mining, mechanism research, biomarker discovery, and laboratory/clinical validation to pharmaceutical companies and medical institutions. Its collaborative R&D business involves in-depth partnerships with biotechnology firms to jointly develop innovative drugs in the immunology field and companion diagnostic products. The company’s independently developed diagnostic product pipeline focuses mainly on early cancer screening, prediction of tumor response to medication, and forecasting of toxic side effects.

“Our self-developed product pipeline is still in its early stages. We expect to initiate the regulatory submission process for our first AI-enabled immunology-based cancer early screening product by the end of this year, shifting our business focus from scientific research services to diagnostic product development and collaborative R&D with pharmaceutical companies. The global development of AI-driven immunological diagnostics remains in its infancy. Leveraging China’s multifaceted advantages in data availability, cost efficiency, and supportive policies, we are well-positioned to take a leading role,” stated Wen Wen.

Currently, 68% of Class I innovative drugs approved and marketed in China are immunology-related. Globally, 73% of ongoing clinical drug trials are focused on immunology. Furthermore, seven of the top ten financing deals in the life sciences sector in 2019 were in the field of immunology. The importance of immunology in life sciences is self-evident, giving rise to vast commercial opportunities.

On one hand, nearly all innovative pharmaceutical companies, both domestic and international, have established pipelines focused on immunology, covering multiple therapeutic areas including oncology, autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatism, systemic lupus erythematosus, and type 1 diabetes), neurological disorders (such as multiple sclerosis), infectious diseases (including vaccines and anti-infectives), and hematological disorders. On the other hand, homogeneous competition around the same immune targets has become increasingly intense. Data indicates that adopting biomarker strategies can significantly increase the approval rates of new drugs in clinical development.

In recent years, global pharmaceutical giants such as Roche, Pfizer, GSK, and Johnson & Johnson have partnered with AI companies to engage in related development efforts. In China, “AI + new drug R&D” companies specializing in molecular screening, including XtalPi, StoneWise, DeepIntel, and SuiKun, have begun to emerge prominently in both the application and capital markets. According to Wen Wen, these developments represent significant opportunities for enterprises engaged in the development of AI applications for life sciences. “AliveX Biotech also aims to deliver greater value across more stages of innovative drug and diagnostic method development.”

Fosun·Star Future Research Institute is an incubation and investment platform focused on the broader healthcare sector, established by Star Future Capital in reliance on Fosun Group and Fosun Pharma. Adopting a “community + incubation + investment” model, it explores frontier innovation areas, focuses on entrepreneurial talent, and secures early-stage investments in future unicorns.

In 2020, the Grand Health Startup Camp launched its second cohort, targeting entrepreneurs in the healthcare sector and aspiring innovators. It invited top-tier global mentors and introduced six core incubation modules, offering startup courses with the most robust industrial background and practical experience in China.

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