YunQuan Intelligence Files for IPO: Empowering Clinical Doctors with AI-Driven Research and Diagnostic Solutions

Let us imagine this scenario: As a specialist in genomic interpretation within the field of oncology, you are tasked with analyzing complex and voluminous genetic data. After performing a series of operations—including annotating genetic variants, identifying driver genes, and recommending targeted therapies—you achieve peak interpretation throughput, processing four reports in a single day, nearly double your usual capacity. Yet, the pile of pending reports before you continues to grow ever higher...

Career advancement demands that you continue your scientific research, helping the hospital accelerate the translation of basic medical research findings into clinical diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. You are compelled to conduct research outside of regular working hours—organizing manually entered data, ensuring data quality, and standardizing data protocols—which consumes significant time for analysis and ultimately yields your own research achievements. Consequently, your weekly working hours may exceed 50, or even reach an astonishing 80. You may find yourself asking: Is there truly no solution to this dilemma?

Although this is merely a hypothetical scenario, the two underlying pain points are real and play out every day:Interpreting genetic testing data is time-consuming and labor-intensive, with the speed and accuracy of manual interpretation failing to meet patient needs. Exhausted physicians, having just stepped off the operating table or completed ward rounds, must immediately immerse themselves in scientific research, tackling challenges such as data organization, analysis, and output generation.

Pain points represent opportunities. Founded in 2018, Tianjin Yunquan Intelligence targets the fields of clinical research and AI-assisted diagnostic genetic testing, developing artificial intelligence products.Launched the intelligent medical research platform for clinical scientific research, “Zhiyi Huiyan,” and an intelligent tumor information interpretation system for tumor gene sequencing.What are the features of Yunquan Intelligence’s products? How are they designed? To address these questions, VCBeat interviewed Wang Xiaowei, co-founder of Yunquan Intelligence—a company in the Fosun Star Future Startup Camp—and the lead for its main products and projects.

Choosing to enter the biomedical field and build a corresponding platform is the result of Yunquan Intelligence’s integration of its own resources. As early as 2018, the biomedical team led by Wang Xiaowei and the artificial intelligence team led by Yao Conglei came into contact due to project opportunities.

Wang Xiaowei’s medical team informed Yao Conglei that there is a mismatch between current technological output and market demand in the field of medical diagnostics.Clinical medical consulting, which relies heavily on intellectual output, cannot fully meet growing business demands.This presented Yao Conglei with an opportunity; he believed that artificial intelligence technology could significantly address the current challenges. The two parties quickly reached an agreement and promptly established Tianjin Yunquan Intelligence.

“This is not a coincidence in cross-industry communication, but an inevitability in breaking through the technological singularity and upgrading industrial dimensions.” An analysis of Yunquan Intelligence’s team reveals a distinction between its biomedical and artificial intelligence teams; yet both are closely aligned in the collaborative development of research platforms and tumor information systems, demonstrating the elegance of deep technological integration—or “genetic exchange”—between these two different “species.” The biomedical team is represented by Wang Xiaowei, Chief Scientist at Yunquan Intelligence.

She graduated from the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Physics at Sichuan University, majoring in Atomic and Molecular Physics.Research Focus: Biomacromolecules and Drug DesignInitially, she had expected to pursue a career in the traditional pharmaceutical industry. However, an offer from BGI Genomics opened her eyes to the vast potential of gene sequencing and the life data industry. With nearly a decade of experience in the field, she has accumulated extensive expertise in oncology and other disease-related research. She has also conducted substantial scientific exploration.Conducted research on tumors and other complex diseases at the genomic, exomic, and transcriptomic levels, published nearly 10 SCI-indexed papers in domestic and international journals, and obtained 2 patents.Currently, she is leading the development of an intelligent medical research platform.

Other members of the medical team also have extensive professional backgrounds.Dr. Tian Caijuan, Chief Medical Officer, established an oncology medical analysis and interpretation platform with independent intellectual property rights. She graduated from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.She has participated in multiple projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China., with particular expertise in the study of B-cell receptors in lymphoma based on immune repertoire sequencing technology.Dr. Zhang Jiangyan, Senior Medical Officer, specializes in the clinical translation of next-generation sequencing and tumor molecular biology., has long been engaged in clinical medical research and clinical genetic counseling, providing foundational insights for the incubation of intelligent interpretation products.

Artificial Intelligence Team, LeadDr. Yao Conglei graduated from Beijing Tianwang Laboratory., is a typical technology-focused entrepreneur. He has held positions at HP, Tencent, and Wandoujia, where he was primarily responsible for building technical teams. He possesses profound expertise in natural language understanding and search engine technologies and products, and has published multiple papers at top-tier academic conferences such as WWW, CIKM, and WSDM.

within his/her teamSenior AI Engineer She Wei, graduated from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, and has also worked at companies such as IBM (China) and HP (China), where he successfully launched multiple products in the fields of artificial intelligence and big data. Currently, the overall team size of Yunquan Intelligence is relatively small, with a total of 26 employees, and the team continues to expand.

One of the reasons why Yunquan Intelligence entered the market is the pain points faced by clinicians in conducting scientific research; another reason is its observation of the domestic research market. Wang Xiaowei stated,“The total size of the scientific research market, as reflected by the 2018 data, was RMB 951.82 billion. However, the distribution across disciplines was uneven. Biomedical sciences held a relatively large share of the research market, accounting for approximately 42%. When further narrowed down to fields amenable to industrial commercialization, the annual market size amounted to at least RMB 100 billion.”However, “due to the unequal distribution of resources, leading figures have occupied a relatively larger share. Therefore, Yunquan Intelligence targets customer groups including top-tier hospitals and mid-level department physicians.”

To help physicians improve efficiency in translational research and clinical outcomes, Yunquan Intelligence has developed the “Zhiyi Huiyan” platform. During project implementation, the company will engage in deep collaboration with hospitals by providing experts in areas such as medical equipment, academic teams, and algorithmic models, and by partnering with hospitals or departmental physicians through integration of their clinical data and research projects.

The platform ultimately delivered to physicians enables them to more easily leverage big data through relevant functions and tools for data analysis. The analytical workflow has also been optimized, allowing users to independently perform analyses, add clinical statistical data, and monitor current hotspots in research trends. To date, this system has helped collaborative users publish more than 10 papers in SCI-indexed journals and at the ASCO Annual Meeting.

Yunquan Intelligence’s intelligent research assistance system, Zhiyi Huiyan, primarily covers two modules: data management and research output.

Data management primarily involves the standardization of data.Current mainstream technologies such as NLP, OCR, RPA, and deep learning are leveraged to process foundational data and achieve knowledge structuring. What sets Yunquan Intelligence apart is its specialized expertise. For instance, in the standardization and structuring of medical knowledge, it builds upon standardized knowledge bases in relevant fields to govern data. Furthermore, it goes even further toUnderstand customer needs through Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs), provide personalized solutions for specific requirements, and facilitate user access to downstream data.

Research output primarily involves bioinformatics analysis of clinical data and literature-based knowledge mining.Yunquan Intelligence's Zhiyi Huiyan PlatformIt includes commonly used medical data statistical tools and bioinformatics analysis pipelines, and also supports the customization of personalized data analysis tools.It enables the integration of multidimensional real-world data with publicly available online data, establishes connections between real-world knowledge graphs and literature-based knowledge graphs, helps users gain research inspiration, and deeply explores the essence of diseases.

For clients, the advantage of using Zhiyi Huiyan lies in its ability to help them fully mine public open-source data, such as new literature and scientific research advances. Most importantly, it enables the mining and reuse of multi-dimensional real-world data.The product is currently in the early pilot phase, with collaborations involving more than ten Grade 3A general and specialized hospitals in Tianjin, Hebei, and other regions.

With the advancement of genetic testing technologies and the decline in testing costs, massive amounts of genetic data are continuously emerging. For enterprises, the interpretation and integration of information have become increasingly important. HoweverThis field is characterized by massive data volumes, complex data structures, a shortage of personnel, and a lag in information interpretation behind scientific research findings.

“An interpreter with average industry proficiency requires four hours to interpret a single report (assuming it contains 10 novel or variants of uncertain significance). The maximum daily output is four interpretation reports.”This bottleneck in clinical interpretation is particularly pronounced when compared to the daily throughput of experiments, sequencing, and data analysis, which can easily reach thousands of cases. Furthermore, the scarcity of professionals skilled in clinical interpretation within the industry has kept labor costs excessively high. According to statistics from Yunquan Intelligence, the labor cost per report is as high as 600 yuan. However, using Yunquan Intelligence’s tumor information interpretation system can reduce the unit cost to below 50 yuan.

On one hand, the market for genetic testing continues to grow. On the other hand, the efficiency of genetic interpretation lags significantly behind. Wang Xiaowei stated, “In the field of oncology genetic testing, the global market size is approximately $50 billion, with China accounting for nearly one-third of this market. However, due to the relatively long industry chain,”Specifically, the report interpretation market may have a potential size of USD 2 billion., but the number of companies deeply entrenched in this field is relatively limited.” The industry’s development prospects and pain points have enabled Yunquan Intelligence to identify opportunities.

In fact, domestic tumor interpretation vendors and third-party testing companies have all developed corresponding systems to provide automated report generation. However, these solutions are generally simplistic, relying on the retrieval of historically accumulated manual expertise. This approach cannot guarantee timeliness, necessitating offline manual verification to ensure accuracy, comprehensiveness, and currency.

IBM Watson was the pioneer in this field and promoted its solutions in China, but its localization efforts were less than ideal. Yunquan Intelligence drew inspiration from IBM Watson’s products and implemented improvements. Yunquan Intelligence’s oncology information interpretation system generates online reports in real time based on the latest literature.

During the process, the core of Yunquan Intelligence's products isBy leveraging NLP and NLG technologies to extract, translate, and integrate oncology information, a comprehensive and accurate knowledge base for genetic diagnosis and clinical treatment has been rapidly constructed. This system enables the automated, efficient, and intelligent generation of interpretation reports to support clinical decision-making.Relatively speaking, the system enhances interpretation efficiency, accuracy, practicality, and professionalism. As an auxiliary diagnostic and treatment system, it specifically addresses the needs of report generation and review processes in actual clinical interpretation workflows, thereby better serving testing operations.

Yunquan Intelligence has also equipped it with a mechanism for manual interactive correction of real-time training AI systems.Yunquan Intelligence plans to conduct clinical validation after the completion of overall development, and will submit the entire system for registration as a Class II medical device, while certain functional modules will be submitted for registration as Class III medical devices.It is currently in the early stage of accumulating preliminary data, with plans to expand clinical trials and provide comprehensive solutions.Currently, our partners include multiple hospitals and healthcare institutions in Hebei, Tianjin, Shandong, and other regions.

For manual interpretation, limitations such as individual expertise and fatigue may lead to slower speeds and lower accuracy. In contrast, AI systems can deliver more precise results as their training models are refined. Most importantly, this technology enhances current productivity, addresses the shortage of skilled professionals, better supports clinicians, and ultimately benefits patients.

From a revenue and expenditure perspective, Yunquan Intelligence has also undertaken some temporary projects, but its core focus remains on Intelligent Medical Research and AI-assisted diagnostic solutions for oncology. In the later stages, it will support the company in launching other intelligent products through data transformation, such as medical devices or diagnostic reagents. Currently, Yunquan Intelligence has already secured a batch of cooperative clients and trial users, and is planning to prepare for commercial promotion. Yunquan Intelligence expects its revenue this year to reach 5 million yuan.

Participation in the Fosun Xing Future Entrepreneurship Camp also provided Yunquan Intelligence with valuable insights into healthcare business models, facilitated connections with more industry professionals, and led to refinements of its business plan. Currently, Yunquan Intelligence is planning a Pre-A financing round to raise RMB 10 million. The company intends to allocate the proceeds toward team building, product enhancement, and market promotion.

Over the next three years, Yunquan Intelligence plans to enhance the efficiency and quality of clients’ medical research, validate its business logic through seed customers, establish a sales team, and implement a nationwide commercial strategy in China. Additionally, Yunquan Intelligence seeks to collaborate with pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, and consulting firms beyond its primary target audience. Over the next 5–10 years, the company aims to empower hospitals and the broader industry, help build a new ecosystem of intelligent healthcare, and drive the development of the medical sector.

Wang Xiaowei stated that the vast volume of data in the healthcare sector is well-suited for the comprehensive integration of artificial intelligence (AI), with certain technologies now being relatively mature. However, it is crucial to fully recognize the limitations of these technologies; AI cannot yet completely replace human practitioners. In the field of medicine, technology should be better integrated into clinical practice to address real-world problems and drive ultimate transformation and upgrading, thereby ultimately benefiting humanity.

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 Entrepreneurship Camp launched its second cohort. Targeting entrepreneurs in the medical and healthcare sector as well as aspiring innovators, it invited top-tier global mentors and introduced six core incubation modules, offering entrepreneurship courses with the most robust industrial background and practical experience in China.

Students interested in the Fosun Star Future Entrepreneurship Camp can add the author on WeChat.