5Y News｜Neox Biotech Completes $30 Million Series A Round, 5Y Capital Continues Support
Exploring the most cutting-edge drug modalities.
Neox Biotech, a frontier technology company using computational design to drive new drug R&D, announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round. 5Y Capital and Sky9 Capital co-led the round, with BAI Capital and Vertex Ventures China participating. Existing investors Yuanjing Capital and HSG also increased their stakes.
The proceeds will primarily go toward accelerating preclinical development across multiple innovative drug pipelines, expanding talent acquisition, and broadening international commercial partnerships. 5Y Capital had previously participated in Neox Biotech's angel and pre-Series A rounds.
Xutian Jing, Managing Director at 5Y Capital, said: "Researching protein-protein interactions has enormous applications in biomedicine, and using computation and AI to study these interactions is the most efficient and accurate approach. As one of neox's earliest investors, we're delighted to see that in just over two years, the company has not only built out its computational design platform but has also begun translating initial results into drug assets. The founding team has demonstrated remarkable acceleration — evolving from a purely technical team into a comprehensive, technology-driven biopharmaceutical organization. We look forward to neoX, with the support of talent, technology, and capital, becoming China's next-generation computation-driven biotech pharma company."
Dr. Hang Chen, co-founder and CEO of Neox Biotech, said: "We're deeply grateful to our new and existing shareholders for their strong recognition of and support for neoX. From day one, armed with a distinctive understanding of new drug R&D, neoX has applied its computation-driven platform neoPlatform to the most promising modalities — what we call neoModality — and achieved exciting progress. With this capital injection from both new and existing shareholders, we will fully accelerate our proprietary and partnered pipeline, neoPipeline, to become a next-generation computation-driven pharmaceutical company."
Over the past six months, Neox Biotech has completed construction of its next-generation innovative drug R&D platform integrating "AI + biophysics + high-throughput" capabilities. Several drug pipelines derived from this platform have made excellent preclinical progress, with potential to become "first-in-class" or "best-in-class" candidates. In 2020, Neox Biotech also received MIT Technology Review's "Best Innovation" award and first prize in the HICOOL Global Entrepreneurship Competition, among other honors, for its major technical breakthroughs in new drug R&D.
Dr. Chen also revealed that multiple drug candidates are expected to reach the PCC (preclinical candidate compound) stage by year-end or early next year. Additionally, Neox Biotech has already established several pipeline-level partnerships with international pharmaceutical companies.
Neox Biotech's value creation in AI-enabled drug R&D is grounded in the underlying logic that biological systems and drug action are computable. The company conducts deep research and characterization of protein-protein interactions (PPI), firmly believing that AI computational design will serve as the engine driving the drug R&D value chain.
"We're exploring the most frontier modalities," said Dr. Chen. "And we believe multispecific molecules and biologics represent the two most promising directions going forward. Using our new neoPlatform technology to design novel modalities, we're achieving true 'think out of the box' breakthroughs in drug design frameworks to tackle 'undruggable' targets."
In the currently hot area of PROTAC protein degradation technology and bispecific molecules, Neox Biotech leverages its deep PPI research to accurately predict "target protein-PROTAC-E3 ligase" ternary complexes, understanding the biophysical principles of protein function and degradation from a higher-dimensional perspective to more rapidly design, screen, and iteratively optimize protein degrader drugs. On the biologics front, Dr. Chen noted that Neox Biotech is particularly focused on the design and development of nanobodies, multispecific antibodies, and neoantigen-T cell receptors.
According to the company, Neox Biotech has efficiently advanced more than 10 research programs through a combination of proprietary pipeline building and co-development partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. The most advanced of these is its protein degradation drug pipeline, which has become a key focus area for the company in the near term.
Industry statistics indicate approximately 4,000 disease-related targets, yet humanity has only addressed roughly one-quarter of them. The remaining three-quarters are considered difficult to drug. Interdisciplinary frontier new drug R&D technology platforms hold promise for cracking this "undruggable" challenge. Neox Biotech sees this historic opportunity and aims to leverage its team's interdisciplinary background and capabilities to accelerate innovative drug development and address unmet clinical needs.
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately $3 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe the world becomes a better place when the crazy you that others see starts to be believed.
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