METiS Therapeutics recently closed a multi-million dollars angel round funding. This round founding was led by Frees Fund Capital, and co-investors from Sourcode Capital& XtalPi Inc., followed by China Renaissance Alpha as the exclusive financial advisor. Thanks to the funding, METiS will build AI-driven pharmaceutical formulation optimization platform in both China and the US, to foster pipeline research and development of novel drug and preclinical formulation development benefiting from the collaboration with domestic and foreign Pharmas.
Incubated by XtalPi, METiS Therapeutics is founded in August 2019. Harnessing the high-throughput pharmaceutical formulation platform and AI algorithm technology, to bring an efficient, comprehensive, and smart approach for the development condition of AI-driven pharmaceutical formulation. This enables the clinical development acceleration for complex molecular drugs.
AI-driven Formulation Platform for top-notch R&D Team from US and China
METiS was co-founded by top scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and serial entrepreneurs. Dr. Lai, the co-founder and CEO of the company, who holds a Ph.D in chemical Engineering from MIT. During his Ph.D period, he served as a researcher of Novartis MIT Center, conducting research on drug crystallization and post-crystallization process through computational models and data export.
At the same time, he also founded AquaFresco, a company leveraging AIOT (AI Internet of Things) water purification technology, and he successfully commercialized wastewater recycling technology. In 2017, Dr. Lai joined McKinsey & Company, a leading management consultancy, providing digital strategy for Big Pharmas.
" I saw two main trends in the pharmaceutical industry at that time. The first trend I saw is that the whole pharmaceutical industry chain was undergoing digital and intelligent transformation, and the AI pharmaceuticals was in a booming stage with exponential growth. Another trend is that China was entering the global market as an emerging player of novel medications." "We hope to accelerate pharmaceutical innovation through AI-driven platform during this transformation era and grab a significant position in the pharmaceutical value chain" said Dr. Lai.
Since 2017, Dr. Lai has been collaborating with Dr. Chen Hongmin, who is also a scientific consultant, to incubate METiS as pharmaceutical project from XtalPi. Dr. Chen holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT. She has held senior positions at well-known pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and Astra Zeneca. She has been a serial pharmaceutical entrepreneur and pharmaceutical research expert for many years.
In 2000, while serving as director of Formulation Development at TransForm Pharmaceuticals, Dr. Chen developed the high-throughput formulation technology platform as well as pipelines. TransForm was acquired by J&J for over $200 million.
In 2010, Dr. Chen joined Kala Pharmaceuticals as chief Scientist and successfully leveraged laboratory technology bringing two drugs in clinical Phase iii/NDA, leading the company to go public in 2017. For these successful entrepreneurial experiences in pharmaceutical formulation rather than scientific achievements, Dr. Chen was dubbed as fellowship of the National Academy of Engineering.
At the end of 2019, Dr. Chen joined the METiS team as a director and scientific consultant, leading the formulation platform development.
Dr. Wenshou Wang, as co-founder and COO of METiS Therapeutics, is an expert in the synthesis of small molecules. He has been deeply engaged in the field of artificial intelligence for many years and co-founded Inkbi, a start-up company that achieves high-precision 3D printing of formulations and excipients through visual learning system. METiS has a bunch of senior practitioners in drug manufacturing, pharmaceutical digitization and other related fields. Dr. Li of the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, who will domestically serve as vice president of technology.
"By integrating high-throughput formulation technology platform, AI-polymer materials knowledge, and cloud computation and quantum mechanics technologies, we successfully incubated critical algorithm tools and experimental platform technologies." "Dr. Lai said. In September 2019, METiS team decided to return to China from Boston and bring the technology to China. Whereafter, METiS won the second prize in the Innovators World competition and landed the company in the China-Australia Medical Industrial Park with the sustained support of the local government and enterprises.
Proprietary AI-driven Formulation Platform
AI-driven novel drug development become a mainstream in recent years, harnessing AI to foster target design, drug molecular design, crystal optimization in the process of novel drug development can greatly shorten the cycle of drug development. "About 90 percent of the complex molecules currently in development have problems with bioavailability, solubility, toxicity, etc., which accounts for 39% of preclinical molecular development failures. The traditional solution is through trial-and-error relying on expert heuristics, but this approach seems difficult to find optimal formulation condition to improve drug development efficiency." "Dr. Lai said.
METiS AI-formulation development platform has integrated AI reinforced learning engine, cloud quantum force field calculation and experimental platform. Firstly, AI engine will generate a high-dimensional Design Space (formulation library), and then explore the high-dimensional room through quantum computation to screen possible successful formulations, which will be imported into the customized formulation experimental platform. After verification on the experimental platform, aggregated data will be input into experimental statistics library, and then constantly update the model in a repeated way by virtue of AI reinforcement learning engine so as to tap into an optimal formulation condition.
"Just like AlphaGo, the first AI robot to defeat the World champion of Go, it has the ability to play against himself, calculate and simulate, as well as the ability to experiment and explore itself. What we want to provide is a similar platform for AI drug development, exploring the high-dimensional design space through high-throughput computation and experimentation." Dr. Lai said.
METiS horizontally integrated a variety of formulation modules, including crystal, solid dispersant, sustained releases; Traditional lipid formulation, surfactant and other liquid formulation, as well as complex self-synthesized nanocarriers, macromolecular formulation.
Thanks to the independently developed big data algorithm, experimental platform and the founding team's profound pharmaceutical experience, METiS can effectively bolster the formulation optimization by using AI integrated experimental and computational platform. At the present stage, METiS focuses on two aspects: assisting pharmaceutical companies in the optimization of preclinical formulations; Develop new drug formulations with low risk, low cost, short development cycle but high drug value.
Current domestic landscape constitutes of volume-based procurement, consistency evaluation, etc.，many generic drug companies are facing great pressure from mark-down sale. In another word, and industry transformation is the approaching trend. By virtue of AI formulation development platform, it can produce some high-value pharmaceutical new drugs (505(b)(2)) at relatively low cost and risk, breaking through patent restrictions, and addressing the problems such as low bioavailability, high toxicity due to its drug delivery.
METiS AI-formulation Platform
Currently, METiS is cooperating with pharmaceutical companies and hospitals such as XtalPi and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to develop pipelines for cancer and infectious diseases.
Dr. Lai said, "Compared with other AI application scenarios such as target discovery and molecular design, formulation verification is faster. It comes with a high success rate that it takes about one year to enter the clinical verification phase, and druggable or even marketable after 3-4 years,. METiS expects to grab a pivotal position in this value chain, and we are aiming to accelerate the efficiency of drug development with our AI platform, and addressing pain points in drug delivery, and bringing high-quality and efficient new drugs to patients. We are very excited to have the support from top investors in AI and pharmaceutical field, such as Frees Fund Capital, Source Code Capital and XtalPi. This is a great affirmation for METiS and we look forward to sustainably creating value together in AI pharmaceutical field."
Investors’ View
"Computation/AI-driven biotechnology has been our key investment field since we invested in METiS in 2016, including the high-profile AI-driven Pharmaceutical" said Feng Li, founding partner of Frees Fund.
METiS team has a superior background in the fields of computation, chemical engineering, material and pharmaceutical science, and they have deep understanding of design technology of cutting-edge dosage forms such as nano formulations, microspheres and oral controlled release. What's more, the team has practical experience in fostering multiple product pipelines to phase III with the goal of product commercialization.
METiS' proprietary high-throughput platform for drug screening and optimization will provide data for AI-driven drug development in near future. With innovative therapies such as gene therapy craving new drug administration and delivery technology, we are very optimistic about METiS' potential to provide technical services and disruptive drug development because of its combination of computation and formulation design."
Mr. Yungang Huang, a partner from Sourcecode Capital, said: "Sourcecode Capital has been keeping eyes on the role of AI in the medical and pharmaceutical field, and constantly focus on this innovation and evolution technology. The pandemic has raised the whole society's expectations for the pharmaceutical and medical industry for the application of new technologies and new approaches, such as how to implement drug research and development in a more rational way. METiS has found a unique value creation standpoint in the AI-driven pharmaceutical field, aiming to bring the team's rich experience to domestic pharmaceutical innovation to help the industry and patients by improving the efficiency and quality of drug development. We are looking forward to it."
"XtalPi is expecting METiS to be the most competitive team in the world in this field," said Mr. Wen Shuhao, chairman of XtalPi. As a continuous entrepreneurial team from MIT, the team has a very strong engineering and scientific innovation belief to drive the company's common values. From company operation to pharmaceutical industry experience, this team has complementary skills. Especially Dr. Chen's decades of pharmaceutical formulation experience, which will bring a comprehensive understanding for the team to digitize pharmaceutical formulation process to find the best AI application scenarios. Or even addressing obstacles from an atomic or electronic view. In this regard, XtalPi is also looking forward to leveraging its advantages in physics and AI algorithms through our collaboration. We expect METiS to become more prominent in the small and large molecule drug market, especially in the large molecule market when METiS established a matured collaboration platform. We will see the huge potential of METiS with almost no ceiling."
Mr. Xiang Zhou, Managing Director of China Renaissance Capital, said, "We are pleased to have helped METiS successfully complete the angel financing round. AI pharmaceutical is a high-profile investment field in recent years. Under the realistic context of long cycle and high cost of traditional drug R&D, AI-driven technology can effectively shorten the research and development time and improve the value of pharmacoeconomics. We are surprised to find that the AI pharmaceutical field needs much more inter-disciplinary talents, METiS has a supreme team with profound professional and rich industry experience in both formulation optimization and artificial intelligence. Without a doubt, by exploiting AI to optimize formulation constantly as the pivotal breakthrough point will bring more disruptive drug development and revolutionize the traditional R&D model."
