Zhiyao Yuanchuang Files IPO Prospectus: Pioneering AI-Driven Protein Drug Design in Collaboration with Nobel Laureate Teams

The wind of AI pharmaceuticals is still blowing.

In 2020, with the advent of AlphaFold, the "AI + Biology" field ushered in a period of explosive growth. Particularly in the medical sector, artificial intelligence has become a massive application scenario, demonstrating significant cost reduction and efficiency enhancement across its entire industrial chain, bringing revolutionary changes to the industry. By 2025, the emergence of DeepSeek in the artificial intelligence industry caused a major stir, with ripples spreading into the AI pharmaceuticals sector.

In the pharmaceutical industry, AI has opened up more possibilities for understanding and grasping data.IMO, as an AI pharmaceutical enterprise founded by researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is a "leader" in protein drug design technology.Since its establishment in November 2023, IMO has rapidly risen to prominence. It has collaborated with members of the Nobel Prize-winning chemistry team for protein design, the inventor of the RFDiffusion method for protein backbone design, and the Co-founder of the internationally renowned protein design company Xaria, to release MotifBench, a protein design algorithm evaluation platform. IMO has built an end-to-end, graphical, one-click generative platform with independent intellectual property rights for AI-driven protein drug design. It has also established project collaborations with multiple domestic and international publicly listed pharmaceutical companies to accelerate protein drug development services and is advancing seven proprietary protein drug pipelines.

Established for less than two years, IMO has quickly made a name for itself in the pharmaceutical field. Through collaborations with several internationally renowned pharmaceutical companies, as well as top medical institutions in China such as Ruijin Hospital, Renji Hospital, West China Hospital, and Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, Intelligent Medicine Original has achieved numerous accomplishments on the industry front. Behind these achievements lies the profound expertise of its founding team.

It is reported that IMO was founded by two professors from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Professor Haifeng Chen focuses on AI-based protein design and the precise molecular force field research of disordered proteins, with over 160 SCI papers published to date. Professor Zhangsheng Yu has more than 15 years of international and domestic clinical trial experience and has published multiple research articles in top medical journals such as JAMA and its sub-journals, and The Lancet’s sub-journals.

Therefore, in the field of protein design, the IMO team is well aware of the limitations of traditional methods. These methods are not only time-consuming and costly but also have an extremely low success rate. However, with the advent of AlphaFold in 2020, the problem of protein design from sequence to structure has been greatly resolved, advancing exploration and research in the biological field. The IMO team keenly seized this opportunity and was among the first to enter the AI + protein赛道.

Compared with mature small molecule drugs, peptide drugs have demonstrated unique advantages. Dr. Wei Ting, CTO of IMO, told VCBeat that peptides, as endogenous molecules in the human body, have much lower toxicity than small molecule drugs, offering patients a safer treatment option. At the same time, the larger molecular weight of peptide drugs provides a broader binding surface, enhancing the efficacy of the drug. The introduction of AI technology has effectively addressed the long cycle and high cost pain points of traditional drug discovery, injecting new vitality into the development of peptide drugs.

In order to fully leverage the potential of peptide drugs, the IMO team has achieved numerous breakthroughs in original technology. On one hand, addressing the shortcoming of peptide drugs' short half-life, IMO utilizes its proprietary artificial intelligence protein design and screening system —The TransProtein platform designed and optimized the candidate drug, extending its half-life to three times that of commercially available products.

On the other hand, IMO also utilizes artificial intelligence technology,Conducting High-Efficiency De Novo Protein Drug DesignPlanDe novo can quickly identify and screen out proteins with high activity and low toxicity, providing a foundation for drug development. In the discovery of novel drug targets, De novo has also demonstrated strong capabilities. By discovering targets based on the dynamic characteristics of structured proteins, De novo efficiently identifies potential drug targets, addressing the issue of dynamic structure prediction that the AlphaFold model failed to solve.

This breakthrough has opened up a new path for new drug development.

In terms of clinical value positioning,IMO focuses on the fields of metabolic and neurological diseases.These fields have urgent patient needs, while existing therapies have many pain points, such as poor compliance and drug resistance. IMO is committed to breaking through the limitations of traditional therapies through technological innovation, providing patients with more convenient and efficient treatment options.

In the field of metabolic diseases, IMO has successfully developed a weekly formulation to address compliance issues with existing therapies, effectively reducing the frequency of medication for patients and improving treatment convenience. Meanwhile, to tackle drug resistance, IMO is developing multi-target drugs with the aim of providing patients with lasting and stable efficacy.

In the field of neurological diseases, IMO has addressed the challenge of GLP-1 drugs struggling to cross the blood-brain barrier through ingenious design, enabling targeted treatment of neurosystem-related disease targets with GLP-1 drugs.

In terms of osteoporosis treatment drugs, IMO has also achieved significant results. The company screened multiple novel peptide sequences and, by calculating the binding free energy of these sequences with receptors, discovered cyclic peptide structures with higher affinity.

In the field of industrial enzymes, IMO has obtained design sequences with higher enzyme activity for CALB industrial enzymes. In terms of gene editing proteases, IMO is currently working on a completely new design of the protein backbone for the novel Ago gene editing enzyme.

It is worth mentioning that, through the Transprotein screening platform, IMO carefully selected 60 candidate sequences from 10,000 generated sequences for experimental validation. Over 50% of these sequences succeeded in the initial round of wet-lab experiments. The designed proteins not only demonstrated potent therapeutic effects, comparable to semaglutide, but also achieved an extended half-life of approximately 2.8 weeks. Building on this, IMO focused on GLP-1-based design, identifying functional target sites and creating entirely new protein sequences, further broadening the application scope of the drug.

Currently,IMO has independently developed 7 protein drugs, which are respectively in the computational design stage and wet lab validation stage.Wei Ting stated that IMO focuses on the discovery of novel drug targets. Peptides, a class of compounds formed by multiple amino acids linked through peptide bonds, play a significant role in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of various diseases such as cancer, hepatitis, and diabetes due to their unique advantages of high efficacy, low toxicity, and high selectivity.

In addition to its self-developed pipeline, IMO has also launched CRO services., has formed three core product lines, namely peptide optimization services, diagnostic reagent development, and enzyme engineering services.

In the field of peptide optimization services, IMO has modified GLP-1 analogs for listed pharmaceutical companies. By employing advanced reinforcement learning algorithms, IMO screened two entirely new GLP-1 analogs, enhancing both activity and half-life, thus providing a more effective solution for the treatment of metabolic diseases. In the area of diagnostic reagent development, IMO developed diagnostic peptides with higher affinity anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies. In enzyme engineering services, IMO redesigned industrial lipase, increasing enzymatic activity by 1.7 times.

Discussing industry trends, Dr. Wei Ting stated that the biotechnology sector is currently undergoing profound changes. The transformation of computational paradigms, such as the application of quantum computing in free energy calculations, is driving drug development towards greater efficiency and precision. At the same time, regulatory innovations like the "AI Drug Green Channel" introduced by the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) have provided more convenience for companies in new drug research and expedited the process of bringing new drugs to market. Additionally, the shift in capital preferences is noteworthy, with investors placing a higher valuation premium on "algorithm + wet lab closed-loop" projects.

To prepare for the upcoming rapid development, IMO is actively preparing for a new round of financing. According to reports, these funds will be used to strengthen the platform's construction capabilities, industrialization capabilities, and independently explore and collaborate on undertaking more valuable projects. IMO believes that based on its powerful AI protein design platform, the team will be able to empower the industry and bring more cost-effective products and services to the biopharmaceutical field.