5Y News | Signet Therapeutics Raises Nearly $10 Million to Power AI-Enabled Innovative Targeted Drug Development Through Disease Modeling Platform
Advancing pharmaceutical innovation in China.
Today, Signet Therapeutics, a Shenzhen-based company developing innovative targeted cancer therapies built on disease models, announced the completion of an angel+ round raising nearly $10 million. The round was led by 5Y Capital, with participation from Yayi Capital and Blue Ocean Capital, while existing investors Tiantu Capital and Sky9 Capital, among others, continued to increase their stakes. The proceeds will accelerate the advancement of two innovative targeted therapy pipelines toward clinical trials, while also expanding the company's disease model platform and its applications. Combined with an angel round of approximately RMB 60 million announced this March, Signet has secured over RMB 100 million in investment within its first year of operation.
"Signet's two first-in-class pipelines both originate from massive unmet clinical needs," said Xutian Jing, Managing Director at 5Y Capital. "Their work will not only drive pharmaceutical innovation in China, but also bring new hope to cancer patients who currently have no treatment options. Beyond our strong recognition of the Signet team's global leadership in cancer research, particularly in gastric cancer, we are also optimistic about the transformative potential of their disease model platform to empower new drug R&D. We believe Signet's key differentiator — using its disease model platform to identify and resolve problems traditionally encountered in clinical stages during preclinical development — represents an irreversible trend in pharmaceutical R&D."
Founded in late 2020, Signet's founding team comes from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard University, a top global research hospital integrating basic translational research, clinical trials, and cancer treatment, with approximately 1,100 ongoing clinical trials. Based on cancer patients' genomic characteristics, the Signet team established proprietary disease models and formed a deep strategic partnership with AI drug discovery company XtalPi to rapidly advance two targeted therapy pipelines toward clinical development, while also expanding the disease model platform to broader applications in drug discovery — including pharmacodynamic evaluation and novel target identification — to empower more innovative pharmaceutical companies.
Before founding Signet, Dr. Haisheng Zhang worked under the guidance of Adam Bass at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Bass's leadership of the gastric cancer TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) project resulted in a landmark classification of gastric cancer — the third-deadliest cancer globally — into four distinct molecular subtypes, published in Nature. Among these, diffuse gastric cancer belongs to the genomically stable subtype, meaning traditional drugs targeting HER2, EGFR, and other common targets are unsuitable. Moreover, diffuse gastric cancer patients often respond poorly to conventional chemotherapy and radiotherapy, creating urgent clinical demand for effective targeted therapies.
Dr. Zhang and his team have worked in this field for years. Using organoid models and transgenic mouse models they developed, combined with proteomics and other methods, they identified powerful targets for this cancer type. Their findings were published in Cancer Discovery (IF: 39.4), a leading cancer research journal. This discovery quickly filled a critical gap in the field and inspired more researchers and experts to pursue work in this area.
While maintaining its focus on gastric cancer research, Signet has also built a proprietary disease model platform for cancer drug development, addressing a critical bottleneck in pharmacodynamic evaluation and further empowering and accelerating target discovery and the translation of targeted therapies. Pharmacodynamic assessment is key to drug molecule screening and optimization. Traditional drug development uses cell lines in in vitro experiments to simulate molecular responses in the human body, but these often diverge significantly from actual human results — a discrepancy that can directly lead to clinical trial failures. Drawing on years of research and unique insights in cancer biology, functional biology, and genomics, the Signet team has built a targeted cancer disease model platform using real genomic data from cancer patients. This enables earlier access to drug response data much closer to actual patient reactions during drug discovery, providing timely and reliable critical R&D information for drug screening, evaluation, and optimization — thereby substantially improving clinical trial success rates.
Signet's disease models have already shown initial success in gastric cancer targeted drug development. The team will now extend this technology to establish disease models for other cancer types including colorectal, lung, and breast cancer, bringing transformative improvements to pharmacodynamic evaluation and empowering pharmaceutical companies to discover authentic, development-ready novel targets that can feed more targeted therapies into the R&D pipeline.
In 2020, Signet established a deep strategic partnership with XtalPi, a leading AI drug discovery company, leveraging XtalPi's strengths in AI-driven drug discovery and medicinal chemistry to rapidly design and synthesize a batch of highly active candidate molecules. Signet used its disease model platform to screen and evaluate these molecules, then optimized them through an iterative "enzyme activity — disease model function — enzyme activity" R&D model with XtalPi. Within just over six months, they obtained a preclinical candidate compound with independent intellectual property rights. This drug has the potential to fill the gap in the diffuse gastric cancer targeted therapy market, significantly improve patient survival, and extend to targeted treatment of ovarian, breast, pancreatic, and other aggressive cancers. Building on this, combination with chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs could substantially improve patient outcomes.
Based on the effective experience accumulated through this pipeline, Signet and XtalPi have deepened their collaboration, applying the "AI drug discovery + disease model platform" R&D model to develop an entirely new drug pipeline against a novel target.
Dr. Haisheng Zhang, Founder and CEO of Signet Therapeutics, stated: "Signet's rapid progress in securing two funding rounds and advancing R&D, along with our quickly growing team, would not be possible without the trust and support of our investors. We aim to expand our technology platform and expertise to accelerate the translation of new discoveries in oncology into targeted therapies that fill critical treatment gaps. We have established an innovation center in Boston, focused on pioneering breakthroughs at the frontier of cancer research, while our Shenzhen headquarters serves as our drug discovery center, rooted in the industry and driven by unmet clinical needs to advance our pipeline and platform empowerment. Our goal is to evolve from a boutique biotech company toward a biopharma company over the next three to five years."
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately RMB 32 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. 5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires entrepreneurs who are going it alone, providing them with support from the spiritual to the operational. We believe that if the "crazy" you that others see starts to be believed in, the world will become a different place.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
