UCDOM Biotech Completes Pre-A Funding Round Led by Fosun Pharma, Advances AI-Driven Drug R&D Platforms

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that Yudao Biotech (UCDOM), a company specializing in the development of informatization and intelligent products for drug R&D, has announced the completion of its Pre-A financing round, with investment from Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Industry Development Co., Ltd. Yudao Biotech’s main product lines include the ACISS series (informatization products for drug R&D) and the AILLO series (intelligent products for drug R&D).

Yudao Bio was established in 2009 and formally incorporated in 2013. Headquartered in Shanghai, it is one of the earliest companies in China to develop informatics and intelligent solutions for drug R&D. The company’s team consists primarily of leading scientists in computational cheminformatics and drug discovery. Yudao Bio specializes in helping pharmaceutical companies achieve digitalization and intelligence in their drug development processes. Its technologies and products are backed by nearly a decade of prior R&D experience, creating significant technical barriers to entry.

Reporters have learned that one of Yudao Bio’s current key products is the ACISS New Drug R&D Data Management Platform. This system enables information-based management of data ranging from chemistry to biology across the entire new drug development process, and employs electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) to replace traditional paper-based lab notebooks, effectively helping pharmaceutical R&D companies reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Currently, the ACISS product has been procured by multiple listed pharmaceutical companies and Fortune 500 material and chemical enterprises, and has been operating stably for many years in mid-sized R&D companies with more than 200 employees. Furthermore, China’s “Blue Pharmacy” initiative aimed at discovering new drugs from the ocean, as well as the Intelligent Mining Platform for Polar Natural Products of the Chinese Polar Research Center, were both built using Yudao Biology’s ACISS system.

Yudao Bio’s other core product is the AILLO series of intelligent solutions for drug R&D. This product features highly distinctive technologies in the early stages of drug discovery, specifically in the identification of novel targets and binding sites, as well as in lead compound discovery. The AILLO product line currently boasts the world’s leading knowledge database for allosteric drug development and possesses multiple proprietary algorithmic tools for target identification based on clinical patient data and site identification based on protein structures (all published in top-tier academic journals in the field, such as AJHG). To date, the AILLO series has established collaborations with numerous Grade 3A hospitals and leading innovative drug R&D enterprises in both small-molecule and large-molecule therapeutics.

Drug development is a highly traditional industry with extremely high barriers to entry. Due to the unique nature of this sector, it has currently reached a bottleneck in terms of conventional technologies. Yudo Bio believes that the introduction of advanced information and intelligent technologies into pharmaceutical companies at this juncture could significantly enhance R&D efficiency and enable entirely new breakthroughs in areas that were previously unattainable through traditional methods.

Regarding future development prospects, Dr. Shen, Chief Technology Officer of Yudao Bio, stated, “Yudao Bio is a remarkably low-profile company that upholds steady, pragmatic growth driven by technological accumulation and innovation as its core corporate philosophy, firmly believing that information and intelligent technologies will transform the world. In the future, Yudao Bio will further invest human and material resources to refine and expand its existing product portfolio, while collaborating with pharmaceutical companies globally to help more drug R&D enterprises reduce costs and improve efficiency, thereby opening up new perspectives in drug discovery and development through advanced intelligent technologies.”

Empowered by AI and machine learning, drug discovery is poised to enter an era characterized by greater speed, cost-efficiency, and effectiveness. Fosun Pharma has expressed strong confidence in Udao Bio’s technological expertise in AI-assisted original drug discovery.