DaXiang Tech Secures Tens of Millions in Series A Funding Led by CDH VGC to Accelerate Organ-on-a-Chip Industrial Layout

The domestic organ-on-a-chip industry chain reaches a new development milestone.

Recently, Beijing Daxiang Biotech Co., Ltd., a leader in China’s organs-on-chips (OOC) sector, announced the completion of its Series A financing round, raising tens of millions of yuan. The round was led by CDH VGC (CDH Venture Partners’ Innovation and Growth Fund), with MiraclePlus as a participating investor, while existing shareholders WuXi AppTec, Furong Investment, and Jiuyou Capital further increased their stakes.

Zhou Yu, CEO of Daxiang Biotech, revealed that this round of financing will be primarily used to accelerate the company’s existing organ-on-a-chip industry chain layout and to support the research and development of new organ-on-a-chip platforms and models. These efforts aim to provide highly biomimetic, high-throughput tools for innovative drug discovery, thereby enhancing R&D efficiency. Meanwhile, the company will advance the application of organ-on-a-chip technology in the field of personalized precision medicine.

Organ-on-a-chip technology represents a seamless integration of microfluidics and tissue engineering, enabling precise control over various system parameters—such as fluid shear stress, molecular concentration gradients, and multi-organ interactions—to faithfully recapitulate the complex architecture, tissue microenvironment, and physiological functions of human organs in vitro.

At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, organ-on-a-chip technology was recognized as one of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies. The organ-on-a-chip market in Europe and the United States developed earlier, with companies such as Emulate and Mimetas leading the industry. These pioneers are expanding the commercial applications of organ-on-a-chip technology in fields including drug development, precision medicine, environmental monitoring, and cosmetics research and development.

In addition, the U.S. FDA and NIH are leading research on “Clinical Trials on a Chip” and have established testing centers to conduct standardized evaluations of organ-on-a-chip products worldwide, with relevant standards and guidelines expected to be released in 2025. Meanwhile, numerous leading pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the United States have formed the non-profit Innovation and Quality Consortium (IQ Consortium) to promote the standardized application of organ-on-a-chip technology in drug development, and have launched multiple collaborative projects with various organ-on-a-chip companies.

In contrast, the development of organ-on-a-chip technology in China had previously remained at the level of academic research, until the launch of Daxiang’s first commercial organ-on-a-chip products and models in 2020.

In August 2020, Daxiang launched three domestically produced commercial organ-on-a-chip products with fully independent intellectual property rights, and built various pathological and physiological models based on them.

Currently, highly biomimetic models such as liver models, tumor models, and blood-brain barrier models have undergone data validation by authoritative third parties and gained recognition from leading international pharmaceutical companies. As a result, Daxiang has become the first organ-on-a-chip company in China to collaborate with top multinational pharmaceutical firms on drug development projects, achieving a closed commercial loop spanning technology platform establishment, product R&D, industrial-scale manufacturing, and product application.

In addition, a review article by scholars from New York University was published in the Cell subsidiary journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences at the end of 2020, providing a detailed overview of the commercialization status of organ-on-a-chip technology companies worldwide. Daxiang was the only Chinese organ-on-a-chip company included in the list.

From the perspective of industry insiders, organ-on-a-chip technology, as a groundbreaking iterative model, holds immense potential in the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical R&D sector. It is poised to revolutionize the innovative drug development industry by shortening R&D cycles, reducing costs, and improving the success rate of new drug approvals.

Currently, organ-on-a-chip models are widely applied across various stages of the drug discovery process, including early biomarker discovery, target validation, lead compound identification and optimization, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) studies, as well as preclinical efficacy and toxicology studies.

Analysts from small and medium-sized domestic securities firms specializing in the pharmaceutical sector have also noted that while China’s pharmaceutical industry was previously dominated by generic drug production, it is gradually transitioning toward a First-in-class-oriented innovative drug development model. This shift is driven by increasing government policy support for innovative drugs and intensifying commercial competition. Consequently, there is growing demand for technologies capable of providing accurate in vitro human test results, such as organ-on-a-chip systems, for new drug research and development. As a result, although China’s organ-on-a-chip industry is still in the early stages of commercialization, it holds significant potential for growth.

While empowering the pharmaceutical industry and leading the transformation of drug R&D by constructing high-biomimetic models based on organ-on-a-chip technology, Daxiang’s research team has also set its sights on another important frontier—organoid-on-a-chip.

In the field of precision medicine, next-generation sequencing (NGS) is commonly employed to identify targets and biomarkers. However, due to inherent false-positive and false-negative rates associated with NGS, sequencing results alone cannot fully guide the formulation of treatment regimens. Furthermore, the complexity of intracellular signaling pathways leads to discrepancies between genomic sequencing results of target genes and clinical therapeutic outcomes. Organ-on-a-chip technology holds promise for addressing this challenge.

Organoids are three-dimensional micro-organs derived from pluripotent stem cells through induction by specific factors and embedded culture in 3D matrix gels in vitro. Their main characteristics include the presence of multiple cell types specific to the organ, high histological and genotypic similarity to human organs, and partial recapitulation of the organ’s specific physiological functions (such as hepatic secretion, neural activity in the brain, and cardiac contraction).

A 2021 report by ResearchAndMarkets.com indicated that the North American organoid market reached $290 million in 2019 and is projected to reach $1.4 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.7%. Globally, organoids have demonstrated significant development potential. While a competitive market landscape has already taken shape abroad, the sector in China remains in its early stages.

Organoid technology has advanced rapidly in recent years. Compared with other drug sensitivity screening methods, organoid-on-a-chip platforms offer advantages such as rapid turnaround, high throughput, and strong clinical relevance, while also significantly improving the success rate of organoid culture and enhancing organoid stability and reproducibility. However, traditional organoid culture platforms still face certain technical bottlenecks that limit their application, including the inability to construct immune microenvironment models, reproduce vascularization processes, and achieve multi-organ co-culture.

In addition to various models constructed using human primary cells, Daxiang’s technology platform creatively integrates organoid and Organ-on-a-Chip technologies to launch an Organoid-on-a-Chip platform. By leveraging the advantages of both approaches, it establishes standardized, highly biomimetic, and controllable tumor microenvironment models, thereby addressing the limitations that have hindered the practical application of traditional organoid technologies.

Currently, Daxiang’s R&D team has successfully developed various organ-on-a-chip models derived from tumor tissues and constructed complex in vitro models, including highly biomimetic tumor immune microenvironments. Prospective clinical studies evaluating the concordance between drug sensitivity test results obtained in collaboration with partners and clinical outcomes are also progressing smoothly.

Following this round of financing, Zhou Yu expressed sincere gratitude to both new and existing shareholders—including CDH VGC, MiraclePlus, WuXi AppTec, Furong Investment, and Jiuyou Capital—for their recognition of the company’s development. Daxiang remains committed to driving the Chinese organ-on-a-chip market through technology and will continue to strategically position itself across the organ-on-a-chip industry chain from two dimensions. On one hand, the company will increase its R&D investment, leverage new technologies to build novel models, and promote open and integrated development within the organ-on-a-chip industry. On the other hand, it will deeply explore application scenarios for its existing products and actively expand the use of organ-on-a-chip and organoid-on-a-chip technologies in areas such as new drug development and precision clinical medication.