XTAL Tech Showcases AI-Powered Autonomous Lab to President Xi, Highlighting Breakthroughs in Drug Discovery

XtalPi, one of the four companies that gave key reports to General Secretary on April 29th at the Model Space. What XtalPi's co-founder and CEO, Ma Jian, introduced to the General Secretary was XtalPi's intelligent autonomous experimentation platform and its industrial applications.

XtalPi Co-founder and CEO Jian Ma introduced the intelligent autonomous experimentation platform and its industrial applications to General Secretary. (Source: CCTV)

The current innovation in pharmaceutical R&D relies heavily on numerous experiments to discover principles and verify hypotheses. With a high number of experiments, long validation cycles, and significant challenges in reproducibility, XtalPi has independently developed an intelligent autonomous experimentation platform. This platform is controlled by an AI scheduling system, executed by a cluster of robotic workstations, and guided by large industry-specific models. It represents a new, data-driven paradigm for pharmaceutical research and development.

In practice, XtalPi's intelligent autonomous experimentation platform has shown significant results in reducing the number of experiments, improving research success rates, and promoting automation and intelligence in healthcare.

On one hand, the intelligent autonomous experimentation platform can achieve high-throughput precision experiments, executing experiments and recording data 7x24 hours a day, assisting or even replacing manual experiments. It improves human efficiency by 5 times and data collection capability by 40 times. The platform has more than 30 functional modules, which can be flexibly combined and custom-developed to match experimental needs, achieving full-process intelligence and automation. The platform has been implemented in scenarios such as chemical synthesis, formulation screening, and traditional Chinese medicine analysis, with over 300 robotic experimental workstations deployed, forming the world's largest commercially operated artificial intelligence experimental workstation cluster.

On the other hand, the intelligent autonomous experimental platform, relying on high-quality data accumulated from production and records to train artificial intelligence models, can design experiments more effectively, predict reaction conditions and success rates in advance, and significantly reduce the number of experiments. Unlike manual experimental record data, the AI experimental platform can automatically record all data, including both successful and failed experiments. Based on these high-quality datasets, the company has developed and trained AI models such as those for predicting chemical reaction conditions, which have outperformed internal teams composed of master’s and even doctoral students in various fields, driving experimental design and prediction towards intelligence.

Ma Jian said in his report that XtalPi has been iterating rapidly, which is mainly due to the complete range of industrial categories and supporting industry infrastructure in China. Through the market, components can be efficiently and cost-effectively assembled, and jointly developed with partners.

It is reported that XtalPi is one of the technology companies that early deployed artificial intelligence technology and industrialized its application in various industry scenarios, including healthcare. Since its establishment in 2015, the company has been accelerating drug discovery, new material identification, and chemical automation by leveraging fundamental research results in quantum physics and integrating cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic experimentation. In June 2024, XtalPi officially listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, becoming the first Specialized Technology company to go public under Hong Kong’s Chapter 18C rules.

Ma Jian stated that, as one of the technology enterprises that early laid out the development of artificial intelligence technology and industrialized its application in various industry scenarios such as healthcare, XtalPi has always adhered to independent innovation and taken industrial application as the guide. It continuously explores high-value scenarios, refines its technology, expands application scenarios, and deepens its applications. "In the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, XtalPi will certainly seize the opportunity, take on responsibilities courageously, actively participate in international cooperation and competition, and contribute to the Chinese path to modernization!"