School of Life Sciences, Westlake University

The School of Life Sciences at Westlake University is a research institute whose faculty have spun out multiple AI-driven biotech ventures. Guo Tiannan, a distinguished researcher at the school and founder of Westlake Omics, has described proteins as vastly more complex than genes—"like Transformers" constantly changing in time and space—while building what his investors call the "AlphaFold of proteomics" . Fellow PI Ma Lijia, who joined from BGI and the University of Chicago, founded Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma in 2021 to apply deep learning to gene therapy; her team developed predictive models for CRISPR guide-RNA using 740,000 sequences, and as of late 2025 was presenting work on AAV delivery for in vivo CAR-T at the ESGCT annual meeting . The school's researchers also include Liu Ding, who arrived in August 2025 to establish a "social neural network" laboratory studying the neural basis of instinctive social behavior .