XTAL Tech (02228.HK) Announces Record-Breaking AI-Driven Drug Discovery Partnership with DoveTree, Totaling HK$47 Billion

Intelligent Finance APP learned on August 5 that XtalPi (02228) announced the completion of a pipeline cooperation agreement with DoveTree, with a total order value of approximately HKD 47 billion (USD 5.99 billion). XtalPi has received the initial payment of approximately HKD 400 million (USD 51 million) as stipulated in the agreement. According to the agreement terms, XtalPi and DoveTree have reached a collaboration on multiple innovative drug assets at the preclinical stage, including both large and small molecules. They will also develop new drugs targeting a series of DoveTree-specified targets. DoveTree exclusively holds the global development and commercialization rights for the related drugs. In return, apart from the initial payment, XtalPi is entitled to further payments of approximately HKD 385 million (USD 49 million), as well as potential milestone payments and sales royalties amounting to approximately HKD 46.2 billion (USD 5.89 billion).

This collaboration sets a new record for order scale in the AI + robotics-driven drug discovery field. DoveTree was founded by Dr. Gregory Verdine, a legendary entrepreneur in the biopharmaceutical industry. In this partnership, the profound expertise of Verdine’s team in biological mechanism research, target selection, and commercialization will be deeply integrated with XtalPi’s AI-powered drug discovery technology. The two companies complement each other's strengths to jointly advance high-potential pipeline projects in oncology, immunology and inflammation, neurology, and metabolic disorders. Verdine has extensive successful experience in target selection and innovative drug development, with three marketed drugs he led the development of achieving cumulative sales exceeding $10 billion. This collaboration not only demonstrates XtalPi’s leading technological capabilities in AI-driven drug discovery but also signifies the global biopharmaceutical industry’s strong recognition of intelligent drug discovery models. It is expected to accelerate the R&D process of innovative drugs and bring more clinically valuable treatment options to patients worldwide.

Biopharmaceuticals“The Strongest Brain”+AIPlatform Builds New Paradigm for Large-Scale R&D

DoveTree, named after the Chinese national treasure, the dove tree (commonly known as the "pigeon tree"), aims to integrate the drug R&D advantages of China and the United States. By leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies and innovative R&D paradigms, combined with a strong foundation in basic biological sciences, DoveTree focuses on developing and clinically translating "first-in-class" pipelines in major disease areas, bringing new hope to patients. The founder, Gregory Verdine, is an internationally renowned entrepreneur, scientist, and senior investor in the biopharmaceutical field, achieving remarkable success both academically and industrially. Verdine has participated in the establishment of more than ten biopharmaceutical companies, including Enanta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ENTA), Rein Therapeutics (NASDAQ: RNTX), WaVe Life Sciences (NASDAQ: WVE), and over five publicly listed companies. As the proponent of the concept "drug the undruggable," Verdine pioneered the development of unique molecular glue and peptide technology platforms, successfully applied to target classic "undruggable" targets such as RAS, Myc, and β-catenin. Three drugs he led in development have been approved by the FDA for marketing, with more than ten others currently at various stages of clinical development.

With the synergistic integration of advanced technologies such as generative AI and robotic automation with fundamental sciences like quantum physics and quantum chemistry, the pharmaceutical industry is building powerful algorithmic tools and R&D capabilities at an unprecedented speed and precision. Verdine believes that AI has become a key technology for overcoming innovative targets with R&D challenges. XtalPi's algorithms, computing power, and robotics technology have taken the lead in the AI-driven pharmaceutical industry in terms of accuracy and scalability. This collaboration will combine Verdine’s forward-looking insights and extensive successful experience in target biology and drug development with XtalPi’s "AI + robotic automation"-powered "from 0 to 1" new drug discovery platform capabilities. The pipeline of XtalPi and DoveTree covers unmet clinical needs in the fields of oncology, immunology and inflammatory diseases, neurological disorders, and metabolic disorders, demonstrating significant market potential. Additionally, the two parties plan to jointly advance a series of new drug R&D projects targeting highly challenging or high-value targets selected by DoveTree in the future, with specific plans under further discussion.

Gregory Verdine, founder and CEO of DoveTree, stated, "The technical platform and drug discovery capabilities demonstrated by XtalPi have deeply impressed me. This technology system, capable of achieving innovative breakthroughs in drug development at scale, is gradually transforming the inherent uncertainties in the new drug research and development process into predictable, quantifiable, and solvable engineering problems. This makes XtalPi an extremely rare strategic partner and presents an opportunity to profoundly revolutionize the collaboration model for drug discovery. The scale of our partnership this time is groundbreaking, heralding the arrival of a new era in drug discovery deeply empowered by intelligent technologies. Leveraging XtalPi's robust platform advantages, combined with our deep biological expertise and the mature drug R&D market and ecosystem resources in the United States, DoveTree is committed to developing a series of highly innovative drug pipelines, aiming to bring higher quality and more efficient treatment options to patients worldwide as soon as possible."

XtalPi Chairman Shu-Hao Wen stated, "We have always believed that the deep integration of artificial intelligence and robotic automation technology will fundamentally transform the efficiency and success rate challenges in drug discovery, bringing about a critical paradigm shift. Professor Gregory Verdine and DoveTree possess extensive successful experience in drug development and precise market insight, which are highly complementary to XtalPi’s platform capabilities. This collaboration not only demonstrates the technical maturity of the platform but also represents an innovative exploration in the research and development model. We believe the synergy of both parties’ strengths will accelerate breakthroughs in challenging innovative targets, and we look forward to jointly advancing the future frontier of AI-driven drug discovery. XtalPi will continue to strengthen its world-leading foundational technology platform, working hand-in-hand with global innovation partners to generate more diverse and uniquely promising innovative pipelines from the ground up, creating value for the industry."

AI+Robots Break Through Data Bottlenecks, Building Innovation Engines for Large and Small Molecules

As one of the few companies in the industry with "dry and wet" R&D capabilities in small molecules, large molecules, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), and molecular glues, XtalPi's AI-driven drug discovery platform effectively expands druggable space with unique technical advantages. By integrating quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and robotic automation for experimental validation, XtalPi has independently developed an end-to-end de novo drug discovery solution that covers key R&D stages such as target validation, molecule generation, affinity prediction, ADMET property prediction, and synthetic route design. Through extensive collaborations with innovative pharmaceutical companies, its AI- and robotics-driven R&D system has been validated in numerous real-world R&D projects, accumulating vast amounts of standardized experimental data and high-precision algorithmic data to continuously drive model training and iterative upgrades.

In the validation of target developability, XtalPi integrates cutting-edge AI models, efficient sampling algorithms, and proprietary molecular dynamics simulation hardware, achieving a speed increase of over 10 times to complete the conformational dynamics simulation of target proteins within a week, which would typically take more than three months using current general methods, thereby significantly improving research efficiency. Meanwhile, by combining algorithms with cryo-electron microscopy experiments, XtalPi can reveal the dynamic changes of targets and the mechanism of action with candidate compounds, enabling the discovery of new binding sites and conformational regulation events, providing novel design insights for differentiated drug development.

In drug activity screening, XtalPi possesses a high-precision affinity prediction model co-developed with the world's top pharmaceutical companies and effectively validated across more than 100 targets. This model can predict the affinity of tens of thousands of compounds in a single day while significantly reducing computational costs, thereby achieving the transformation of "computing power into data" to drive AI models to explore the advantageous chemical space of novel drug-like molecules more efficiently.

The compounds with the highest priority in drug-likeness rankings, as evaluated by algorithms, will be synthesized and tested in XtalPi's laboratory equipped with hundreds of automated robotic clusters. XtalPi has built a trillion-level Make-on-demand compound library using high-precision chemical reaction prediction models, which can predict chemical synthesis pathways to help scientists bridge the gap from virtual design space to physical reality. Its intelligent autonomous experimentation platform, combining dry-lab and wet-lab approaches, can complete the synthesis and testing of thousands of AI-generated compounds at high throughput within a week, precisely collecting targeted data for the research system and feeding it back to molecular generation algorithms. Even when facing entirely new targets and systems without prior data, this system rapidly accumulates initial data and continuously optimizes candidate drug molecules to better meet project requirements through efficient iterations, enabling an upgrade in drug discovery from "experience-driven" to "data-driven" modes.

In the field of large molecules, XtalPi's AI-powered large molecule drug discovery platform integrates advanced AI algorithms with high-throughput experimental techniques. It can break through the limitations of traditional sequence space, rapidly identify high-potential antibody candidate molecules, and perform structure-based rational design and optimization of key properties. This significantly shortens the drug development cycle and accelerates preclinical research progress. Its XtalFold® platform is the world’s first AI large molecule drug structure modeling platform that has been fully validated across numerous drug pipelines. It generates high-precision protein complex structures based on sequences and has been validated by multiple international pharmaceutical giants, establishing platform licensing partnerships.

After signing the agreement, XtalPi plans to deepen its collaboration with Dr. Verdine in the field of molecular glue research and development. Currently, by leveraging AI, molecular fragment libraries, automated synthesis, and high-throughput screening technologies, XtalPi has established a molecular glue R&D platform suitable for multiple targets and scenarios. This platform can predict potential molecular glue targets and explore broader and more diverse molecular spaces, using chiral molecular fragments to obtain small molecule compounds with better drug-like properties. By collecting data from automated synthesis reactions of molecular glues and building AI models, XtalPi is able to achieve multiple rapid iterations in compound library design and synthesis during the molecular glue discovery process, accelerating the discovery of molecular glue compounds.