Commercialization landing in more than 30 leading pharmaceutical companies and CROs at home and abroad
It was learned that “Intelligent Technology”, a technology company in the pharmaceutical chemical industry, recently announced the completion of a 30 million yuan A round of financing, led by Sequoia China Seed Fund , Chaosheng Capital followed suit, and the old shareholder Fengrui Capital continued to follow suit. Prior to this, Zhihua Technology received angel round investment from Fengrui Capital.
With the aging trend, the change of disease spectrum, the change of lifestyle, and the development of science and technology, innovative drugs have become “the pearl of the biopharmaceutical industry” because they can cover unmet medical needs.
Frontier scientists are exploring how to use artificial intelligence technology to accelerate the progress of drug development, reduce the failure rate of drug development, and shorten the original “10 billion US dollars” drug development process. This kind of exploration route was assessed by the “MIT Science and Technology Review” as the “Top Ten Breakthrough Technologies” in 2020.
In this exploration, the application of artificial intelligence to chemical synthesis is one of the most challenging aspects. Chemists have been trying for more than 50 years to realize the automatic design of synthetic routes. For a long time, route design has been regarded as a work that only humans can do. Zhihua Technology specializes in “chemical synthesis route design tools”, and has successfully developed AI pharmaceutical reverse synthesis tools and has been commercialized.
From the category point of view, the global API market is dominated by synthetic chemical APIs (accounting for 90% of the market share), and biopharmaceutical APIs as a supplement (accounting for 10% of the market share), which means that the market space for chemical drugs is even greater. For extensive. In addition, the technology platform of Zhihua Technology is not only suitable for the research and development of chemical drugs, but also widely used in a wide range of fields such as materials, pesticides, daily chemicals, and additives. Zhihua Technology said that the chemical synthesis market has reached tens of billions of dollars. With the development of the industry, the total market capacity is expected to be between tens of billions to hundreds of billions of dollars.
The technical threshold is high, and the main competitors are overseas
In the booming AI medicine research and development industry, few competing products can actually use AI to complete the design of chemical synthesis routes. The main reason is the high technical threshold.
Dr. Xia Ning, CEO of Zhihua Technology, shared: “Deep learning alone is not enough to train chemical synthesis products. There are two reasons. One is that the number of publicly available data sets is about 3 to 4 million, and the number is too small. It is because the distribution of chemical reactions is uneven, the amount of data for common reactions is large, and the amount of data for uncommon reactions is small, and it is difficult to do machine training for uncommon reactions.”
So how does Smart Technology respond to this industry problem? This starts from the experience of CEO Dr. Xia Ning. In 2009, Dr. Xia Ning participated in the founding of eNovalys in Strasbourg, France and served as CTO. At that time, he was already using computer technology to solve the problem of chemical synthesis and developed data-based Software, the system has been used hundreds of thousands of times since 2016, and used by thousands of chemists. These more than ten years of experience have laid a solid foundation for intelligent technology and achieved molecular integration.