Image: AI pharmaceutical company Insilco Medicine’s artificial intelligence robotics laboratory in Suzhou, China. \Bloomberg

•In 2020, British AI drug company Exscientia launched the world’s first AI-designed molecule DSP-1181, and launched Phase I clinical research in Japan. This is a therapeutic drug developed for patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unfortunately, the results were not as expected and the study was stopped in 2022. Exscientia currently has four AI-related drugs in progress and has reached cooperation with pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi and Merck.

•Insilico Medicine, an AI pharmaceutical company headquartered in Hong Kong, developed the world’s first small molecule candidate drug for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) INS018_055, which was designed and screened by generative AI. In June 2023, it announced that it would enter the Phase 2 clinical trial stage, which will be carried out simultaneously in China and the United States. Insilico Medicine has currently advanced 6 leading AI drug projects to the clinical stage.

•In May 2023, China’s AI pharmaceutical company Jingtai Technology reached a cooperation with Eli Lilly of the United States. Jingtai used the drug discovery platform ID4Inno to identify potential drug candidates, and Eli Lilly was responsible for clinical and commercial development. The maximum amount of funding is expected to be US$250 million, which is the highest amount of cooperation for a single drug research and development pipeline in China’s AI pharmaceutical company.

•American biopharmaceutical company Recursion Pharmaceuticals uses AI models to identify and design new therapies and is conducting human trials on five drugs, including ones for treating neurovascular diseases caused by small blood vessel malformations in the brain and drugs for treating a certain type of ovarian cancer.

Compiled by Ta Kung Pao