Insilico Medicine Secures $60 Million Series D Funding to Advance Pipeline Development and Build Automated Drug Discovery Lab

On June 6, 2022, VCBeat learned that InSilico Medicine, an end-to-end AI-driven clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced today that it had completed a $60 million Series D financing round, with investment from global investors with extensive experience in the biopharmaceutical and life sciences sectors.

New investors in this funding round include a large diversified asset management firm on the U.S. West Coast and Bohai Huamei (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd., among others. Existing investors, including Warburg Pincus (the lead investor in the previous round), Boston Investment, Qiming Venture Partners, BOLD Capital Partners, Deerfield Management, and Lanting Investment, continued to participate. Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of InSilico Medicine, also personally invested.

The funds raised in this round will be used to further strengthen InSilico Medicine’s financial position and accelerate the development of its pipeline, including its lead asset currently in Phase I clinical trials and the continued development of its artificial intelligence platform, Pharma.AI. The proceeds will also support InSilico Medicine’s ongoing global expansion and established strategic initiatives, including the construction of fully automated AI-driven robotic drug discovery laboratories and robotic biological data factories, to continuously augment the company’s extensive data resources.

Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, Founder and CEO of InSilico Medicinestated: “Despite the unprecedented market conditions in the biotechnology sector, InSilico Medicine has successfully closed its Series D financing round with the support of some of the most prestigious investors, which fully demonstrates the strength of our end-to-end AI-driven drug discovery and development platform. This platform has been validated by numerous partners and has yielded InSilico Medicine’s first novel anti-fibrotic candidate drug: its novel anti-fibrotic target was discovered through AI and aging research, its molecular structure was designed by an AI-powered chemistry generation platform, it has successfully completed Phase 0 microdosing trials in healthy volunteers, and is currently in Phase I clinical trials. Furthermore, since 2021, InSilico Medicine has identified seven additional preclinical candidate drugs across various disease areas. These advancements have excited me greatly, prompting my decision to personally participate in the Series D financing round.”

Fang Min, Partner at Warburg Pincus and Head of China Healthcare Investmentsstated: “The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the field of drug discovery holds incredible potential, offering new avenues for transforming the development of innovative therapies. For InSilico Medicine, 2022 was a year of breakthrough growth and progress, during which the company demonstrated the value of combining deep scientific expertise with cutting-edge technological capabilities by significantly accelerating the drug discovery process. We are delighted to continue collaborating with the InSilico Medicine team to further support this company at the forefront of innovation.”

Since its last round of financing, InSilico Medicine has built a rapidly growing portfolio of therapies in frontier areas, supported by its proprietary artificial intelligence platform. Seven of its internal pipeline projects have entered the IND-enabling stage, including a preclinical candidate novel 3CL protease inhibitor for the treatment of COVID-19, and two “synthetic lethality” anti-tumor therapies targeting MAT2A and USP1, respectively. Furthermore, the company’s most advanced internal anti-fibrosis program has successfully completed a Phase 0 microdosing study and is currently undergoing Phase I clinical trials in healthy volunteers.

Dr. Feng Ren, Chief Scientific Officer and Head of Global Drug Discovery at InSilico Medicinestated: “Since joining InSilico Medicine in 2021, the company has identified seven preclinical candidate drugs, leveraging its powerful artificial intelligence platform and innovative drug discovery model. With over 15 years of experience at major pharmaceutical companies and CROs, I remain deeply impressed by the speed and quality of the company’s discovery projects. InSilico Medicine plans to further expand its existing R&D pipeline and deploy AI and robotics technologies on a global scale. Our rapidly growing team comprises talented and experienced drug development scientists with diverse backgrounds, who are passionately dedicated to innovation and fully committed to accelerating the delivery of new therapeutic options for patients in urgent need of innovative treatments.”

Meanwhile, InSilico Medicine has expanded its collaborations with the biopharmaceutical industry through co-development and software licensing arrangements. In January and March 2022, InSilico Medicine entered into strategic partnerships with Fosun Pharma and EQRx, respectively. Notably, as part of the strategic collaboration with Fosun Pharma, InSilico Medicine achieved its first major milestone in under 40 days: the identification of a preclinical candidate drug targeting QPCTL for innovative cancer immunotherapy. Furthermore, InSilico Medicine has established partnerships with multiple large pharmaceutical companies. Since the launch of its AI-powered target discovery engine PandaOmics™ and small molecule generation engine Chemistry42™ in 2020, nine of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies have licensed InSilico Medicine’s AI-driven drug discovery platform.

InSilico Medicine is an end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company that connects biology, chemistry, and clinical trial analytics through next-generation AI systems. By leveraging modern machine learning techniques such as deep generative models, reinforcement learning, and transformer models, it has built a powerful and efficient AI-driven drug discovery platform capable of identifying novel targets and generating candidate drugs with specific molecular properties. InSilico Medicine focuses on areas of unmet medical need, including cancer, fibrosis, immunology, central nervous system disorders, and age-related diseases, to advance and accelerate the development of innovative therapeutics.