With the theme of "Unite Global Startups, Empower Beijing Innovations", HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurs Summit was held in Beijing from August 26 to 28. HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Competition announced the final list of winners, including 7 first prize winners, 21 second prize winners, 42 third prize winners and other 70 prizes. The project named as "AI-driven Drug Delivery and Drug Discovery" initiated by Dr. Lai Caida and Dr. Wang Wenshou, founders of METiS, won the first prize, the highest award among all the competition.
About HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Competition
HICOOL is a one-stop ecological platform for entrepreneurship sponsored by Beijing Overseas Talents Association (BOTA). Competitions, summit, ecosystem and other modes provided supportive approaches to consolidate the work of talent mining, talent introduction, talent services and talent protection, which enables technology-driven entrepreneurship and value-driven innovation. It is a high-profile competition which attracts 91 countries and regions, 5,016 entrepreneurial projects and 6,672 entrepreneurial talents to participate; It covers seven professional industry areas, artificial intelligence/virtual reality/financial technology, medicine and healthcare, new generation of information technology, cutting-edge equipment, new energy/new materials/energy conservation and environmental protection, cultural creativity, agricultural science and technology/food technology. The competition usually invites top investors, well-known panels and top entrepreneurs to provide the whole process of entrepreneurship guidance and ability to accelerate projects. More excitingly, it provides thoughtful "Beijing Services", such as talent residency, children's education service, medical insurance and talent apartment, so as to continuously empower entrepreneurs.
On the evening of June 26, Dr. Lai Caida, Co-founder and CEO of, METiS, attended the HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Competition Award Ceremony and delivered an electric speech. He said, "It is a great honor for the team to win the first prize. The gratifying R&D progress of METiS not only benefit from the core technology platform and core team, but also the favorable pharmaceutical environment of Beijing, and the high-quality supportive resources provided by the industrial park and the talent subsidy policies of relevant government authorities. We believe that with the HICOOL Entrepreneurship Competition platform and the outstanding resource integration capability of the organizers, many high-quality entrepreneurial teams domestically or abroad will be in the limelight, and they will fully demonstrate their technological innovation with a burgeoning growth."
On the afternoon of 28th, Dr. Lai was invited to attend the "Global Entrepreneur Day" of HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurs Summit. He gave a ‘flash mob roadshow’ to present the content and highlights of the winning project.
The name of the project is "AI-driven Drug Delivery and Drug Discovery". METiS, as the world's first innovational AI-driven drug delivery and drug discovery biotechnology company, on the one hand, is developing small molecule drugs by improving the drug biological availability, stability, forms and new carrier system to overcome the hurdles of small molecule drugs, aiming to design reformulated novel drugs with clinical individual differentiation. On the other hand, it challenges the long-hold mindset from molecular design to drug delivery, an inevitable process of new modality drugs. It deeply set about the new modality drugs process from encoding, DNA, RNA, then to protein, enabling the products to be stably delivered to the target organs to achieve precise targeting and treatment.
Now, the company has applied for a number of patents with crucial application value, and deployed a number of small molecule and nucleic acid research and development pipelines, among which the pipeline with faster progress is expected to carry out pivotal clinical trials in 2023. It is worth mentioning that METiS has built the capability of nucleic acid drug development with the integration of mRNA sequence design and LNP delivery system design with its independent intellectual property rights. The expression efficiency of its LNP nucleic acid delivery system is more than ten times higher than the industry gold standard, and it also achieves targeted delivery to liver, lung, spleen, muscle and other organs or tissues. From that, it enables METiS to achieve local regeneration, systemic/targeted protein secretion, antibody, enzyme replacement, tumor targeting, immunoenhancement and other treatments, which has brought a number of pipeline collaboration opportunities from domestic and foreign large pharmaceutical companies.
METiS has outshined from many high-quality projects in HICOOL 2022 Global Entrepreneurship Competition with the first prize bagged, which fully demonstrated the high innovation level of the company's core technology platform and its wide application and development prospects. We believe that under the drive of HICOOL platform and high-quality resources, METiS will have a further development in terms of cooperate development, R&D innovation, and talent benefits, etc. The enterprise will not fail the recognition from the honorary award. METiS will keep on solving the unmet clinical needs for the patients with more high-quality therapeutics, parlaying the platform benefits from the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum simulation and other cutting-edge technologies.
