AI-Driven Clinical Trial Collaboration: Egelin Medicine and Boji Pharma Forge Strategic Partnership in China

June 5, 2023: A long-established domestic CRO listed companyBoji Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd.(Stock Code: 300404, hereinafter referred to as “Boji Medicine”) andShenzhen Aigelin Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd.(hereinafter referred to as “Eglin Pharma”)Signing of Strategic Cooperation AgreementGuided by the principle of “complementary strengths and mutual benefit,” both parties have entered into a strategic collaboration to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of clinical trials, jointly advancing the efficient clinical development and commercialization of innovative drugs across multiple disease areas. By capitalizing on their respective expert teams and complementary strengths, they aim to use AI to address bottlenecks that impact the efficiency and cost of drug development during the clinical stage, thereby setting a new benchmark for clinical development services for innovative drugs.

The meeting was moderated by Cao Jin, Chief Strategy Officer of Tongxieyi and a startup mentor under the “National Major Talent Project.” Wang Tingchun, Chairman of Boji Medicine, and Du Tao, Chairman of Egelin, engaged in in-depth and friendly discussions, ultimately reaching a consensus on cooperation. Han Yuping, Deputy General Manager of Boji Medicine; Diao Peizhe, Senior Director of Public Affairs at Egelin Pharma; Cui Minghan, Commercial Director; and Cai Wenguang, Deputy Director of the Office, also attended the meeting and the signing ceremony.

Leaders from Both Sides Sign Strategic Cooperation Agreement at Boji Medicine’s Guangzhou Headquarters

The pharmaceutical industry is not only critical to national economic development but also closely tied to public health. The primary pain points in contemporary innovative drug research and development (R&D) are the year-on-year increase in R&D costs, the lengthening of development cycles, and an average success rate for new drug development of less than 10%. Clinical trials are the most time-consuming and costly component of any new drug development program, yet they represent the stage with the highest risk of failure. With the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in pharmaceutical R&D, major multinational pharmaceutical companies have begun exploring how AI can enhance the efficiency and success rates of new drug development. Moreover, growing clinical research practices have further strengthened the confidence of clinical researchers in innovative drugs regarding the adoption of AI technologies. Currently, regulatory authorities in Europe and the United States, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), are actively engaging with the pharmaceutical industry to discuss the potential applications of AI in drug R&D. In 2022, the FDA received more than 180 Investigational New Drug (IND) and New Drug Application (NDA) submissions that included AI/machine learning content and analyses, with the majority of these analyses applied in clinical research.

As a well-known domestic CRO providing full-process, one-stop services, Boji Medicine has accumulated over 20 years of experience and delivered more than 2,000 preclinical, clinical, and regulatory CRO services to pharmaceutical companies. Clinical research has always been one of Boji Medicine’s core businesses; through its clinical research services, it has helped clients obtain more than 80 new drug certificates and over 100 drug production approvals.

Eglin Pharma is one of the pioneers in China in applying AI technology to clinical research. It is also a “dual-business-model” innovative pharmaceutical company, meaning that it maintains its own pipeline of innovative drugs while also providing AI-enabled clinical research services to external clients. Eglin strictly limits the research and development of its proprietary drug pipeline to the fields of ophthalmology, vascular diseases, and autoimmune disorders. In other areas of pharmaceutical clinical research, the company offers clinical trial design services to external partners, including indication selection, determination of clinical endpoints, and subject screening. By leveraging its proprietary “Miaowu” AI technology platform, Eglin makes clinical trial protocols more precise and efficient, thereby increasing the success rate of clinical trials. With the development of China’s pharmaceutical industry, domestic innovative pharmaceutical companies are transitioning from early-stage follow-on drug development to the research of novel agents targeting entirely new mechanisms. Whether these new drugs are First-in-Class (FIC) or First-in-Disease (FID), their clinical trials pose greater challenges and carry a higher risk of failure. The application of AI technology will significantly deepen and broaden clinical design experts’ understanding of diseases, drugs, and development strategies, thereby substantially improving the success rate of clinical research.

Dr. Li Changqing, Chief Medical Officer of Eglin PharmaHe stated, “I believe that artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize the way we conduct clinical trials, from identifying potential new drugs to monitoring patient progress. AI can be used to design more efficient and effective clinical trials. For example, AI can help select suitable patients for trials, determine optimal drug dosages and schedules, and predict which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment. Artificial intelligence can also monitor patient progress during clinical trials and identify any potential side effects or safety issues. This may help improve the safety and efficacy of new drugs. AI has the potential to make clinical trials more efficient, effective, and safe. This could lead to faster development of new drugs at lower costs. It can also bring better outcomes for patients.”

“Eglin has consistently focused on building the R&D advantages of its Miaowu AI platform at the clinical stage, which has been well validated within our proprietary pipeline. Two of our AI-driven novel molecule pipelines have successfully obtained approval in the United States to enter Phase II clinical trials. We are delighted to establish a strategic partnership with Boji Medicine, which also emphasizes clinical-stage development. By deeply integrating the unique clinical-stage algorithms of the ‘Miaowu AI’ platform with Boji Medicine’s robust clinical trial service system and extensive experience, we aim to overcome technical challenges in the clinical phase of drug development, thereby helping clients improve clinical development efficiency and success rates. We look forward to seeing more Me-Only drugs developed through this strong alliance.”

As a critical phase in new drug development, clinical trials must avoid failures caused by improper clinical development pathways or flawed study designs, particularly when candidate drugs have demonstrated favorable safety and efficacy in preclinical animal studies. With the increasing maturity of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, AI has emerged as a potential driver for enhancing clinical trial efficiency and reducing costs. Europe and the United States started applying AI in the clinical stage earlier, primarily focusing on three areas: applying natural language processing (NLP), improving patient stratification, and simplifying clinical trial operational processes. Among the successful companies in this field is Owkin, a US-based company founded in 2016. Owkin uses federated learning to train and develop its machine learning models specifically designed to improve clinical trial efficiency. It has established an advanced model catalog that enables the identification of new biomarkers from imaging, genomics, and clinical data. Owkin is dedicated to identifying patients with characteristics of severe disease progression who are likely to respond best to therapies under development. To date, the company has raised a total of $254 million, with investors including Sanofi, Bpifrance, and Mubadala. Another example is GNS Healthcare, a Cambridge-based company founded in 2000. Its technology creates “virtual patients”—accurate computational disease models—based on various complex datasets. GNS focuses on oncology, immunology, central nervous system disorders, and cardiometabolic diseases. Its technology supports better patient stratification and helps determine which patients should receive first-line or second-line treatments.

Although clinical AI research in China started relatively late, it is showing strong momentum for latecomers to surpass early starters. As a leading clinical-stage AI-driven innovative pharmaceutical company in China, Eglin Pharma not only leverages artificial intelligence to empower drug R&D but also fully capitalizes on its team’s unique advantages in clinical research and international regulatory expertise. The company has built an AI-powered drug discovery platform capable of operating effectively in highly regulated environments. It pioneered a novel R&D paradigm centered on “indication selection,” adopting an end-to-start approach that significantly enhances the efficiency and success rate of clinical development for innovative drugs.

Dr. Zhu Quan, Vice General Manager and Chief Medical Officer of Boji Medicinestated: “Boji Medicine is one of the first one-stop drug R&D CRO companies to be listed in China. Clinical research has always been our core business and area of strength. With over two decades of history in clinical research, we have accumulated extensive experience and established a broad client base across various therapeutic areas in both traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Meanwhile, Boji Medicine boasts outstanding teams for clinical trial design and execution. To this day, many of our successful cases in clinical services remain widely recognized.

In an era marked by the continuous emergence of innovative drug candidates, it has become evident that relying solely on existing clinical development paradigms is insufficient. Clinical protocols designed from the perspective of traditional clinical trials are trending toward increasingly larger patient populations and longer trial durations. The goal of making clinical trials more precise and improving their success rates has accelerated the integration of AI into clinical research. Over the past year, we have closely monitored the advancements of AI in the field of pharmaceutical clinical research and have been eager to make meaningful contributions in this area.

Eglin Pharmaceuticals’ “Miaowu” AI platform represents a pioneering achievement that has been well validated in the design of multiple clinical protocols and has received recognition and approval from the FDA and EMA. In an environment characterized by long development cycles, high costs, and intense market competition for innovative drugs, the deep integration of outstanding medical teams with artificial intelligence platforms will open a door to smarter approaches for clinical research of novel therapeutics. This integration provides data-driven innovative methodologies and decision-making tools for areas such as multi-indication clinical development planning in oncology, clinical R&D strategies for highly uncertain innovative targets, and clinical development decisions for indications with high failure rates. It enables more precise identification of optimal indications and target patient populations most likely to benefit, optimizes clinical development pathways and trial protocol designs, thereby substantially increasing the probability of success in clinical development of innovative drugs and accelerating the overall process. This field holds immense promise.

Eglin Pharma and Boji Medicine exhibit significant complementarity in industrial resources and technological synergy. The establishment of this strategic partnership with Boji Medicine marks the recognition of Eglin Pharma’s AI-driven R&D platform by a publicly listed clinical CRO enterprise, as well as its large-scale application in clinical settings. By integrating Boji Medicine’s one-stop clinical trial resources with Eglin’s AI technological advantages in the clinical domain, the two parties will collaborate to provide safer, more efficient, and higher-value solutions for global pharmaceutical giants and small-to-medium-sized biotechnology companies, jointly ushering in a new era of AI-empowered clinical research in China.

Boji Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd. (Stock Code: 300404, hereinafter referred to as “Boji Pharmaceutical”) is a new high-tech enterprise that provides domestic and international pharmaceutical companies with “one-stop” outsourcing services (CRO+CDMO) covering the entire process of drug and medical device research, development, and production. The company boasts 120,000 square meters of modern office, laboratory, and production facilities, and currently employs more than 1,300 staff members. Boji Pharmaceutical’s service offerings include new drug project initiation and activity screening, pharmaceutical studies (active pharmaceutical ingredients and formulations), drug evaluation (pharmacodynamics and toxicology), integrated services for small-molecule innovative drugs, clinical trials, dual filing in China and the United States (registration services), CDMO production (implementation under the Marketing Authorization Holder system), and transformation of technological achievements, thereby covering all stages of new drug research and development.

Shenzhen Aigelin Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd. is an international innovative pharmaceutical company with a “dual-business model” empowered by AI technology. The company maintains offices and R&D teams in both Shenzhen, China, and the United States. As an AI-driven biopharmaceutical enterprise with extensive clinical experience and expertise in international regulatory affairs, Aigelin is committed to developing therapies for ophthalmic, autoimmune, and vascular diseases that address urgent unmet clinical needs. In addition to advancing its own pipeline in these three therapeutic areas, Aigelin leverages its proprietary artificial intelligence platform and diverse datasets to provide high-end customized services to domestic and international pharmaceutical companies. These services include biological systems analysis, clinical phenotype analysis, indication selection, and clinical trial design, significantly enhancing clients’ efficiency and success rates in clinical drug development.