China's First AI Microbiome Drug Company "Unknown" Raises Nearly $10 Million in Funding

Unknown (Shenzhen Unknown Biotech Co., Ltd.) has officially announced the completion of its Series A and A+ funding rounds. In August 2018, Unknown closed its Series A led by Gaorong Ventures, with participation from 5Y Capital and ZhenFund. Earlier this year, it completed its A+ round led by Lihe Hongxin, with co-investment from Yahui Investment. The two rounds totaled nearly $10 million. Going forward, Unknown will further refine its proprietary microbial drug R&D platform and accelerate several clinical pipelines already underway.

Founded in 2017, Unknown is China's first AI-based microbiome therapeutics company, dedicated to tackling refractory diseases and improving human health through gut microbiome modulation, powered by AI and bioengineering technologies.

The human gut microbiome has been called "the human second genome." Research into its relationship with human disease and health has become one of the most cutting-edge and actively pursued fields in global science. According to the latest scientific and clinical studies, gut dysbiosis is directly linked to more than 50 diseases, including diabetes, obesity, cancer, and autism. Microbiome therapeutics — treating disease and improving health by modulating gut microorganisms — is considered to have extraordinarily broad clinical application potential. The global microbiome therapeutics industry is beginning to take shape, with the US in a relatively leading position and European countries actively following. Although China is just getting started, it boasts advantages in clinical data and strain resources, along with strong policy support.

Unknown's core R&D team comprises scientists from world-class institutions including the Broad Institute, Harvard University, MIT, Stanford University, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York University), and Johns Hopkins University. Its drug development team brings R&D experience from top-tier international pharmaceutical and biotech companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, and Bristol Myers Squibb. Clinical team members have over 20 years of experience in drug clinical trials, regulatory filings, and FDA drug review. Unknown's scientific advisory board includes members of the Chinese and US Academies of Sciences, former FDA drug reviewers, and top experts from the pharmaceutical industry.

In just a year and a half since its founding, Unknown has established a data-driven preclinical platform for microbiome therapeutics, providing end-to-end SOPs for a field that still lacks standardized drug development protocols. The platform comprises six sub-platforms covering the full spectrum from computational analysis, to discovery and R&D, through to manufacturing.

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Computational platform: Unknown's multi-omics big data computing platform uses the latest cloud technology frameworks to restructure traditional bioinformatics pipelines, effectively resolving current bottlenecks in computational processing and analysis, as well as issues with result consistency and reproducibility.

Discovery platform: Unknown's key strain discovery platform integrates proprietary and optimized methods in network analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning. By analyzing and modeling public databases alongside proprietary clinical data, it helps identify disease-treating key strains and their functions.

R&D platform: Unknown is committed to culturomics research, combining genomic and metabolomic experimental techniques with computational analysis to isolate and identify clinically valuable microorganisms, establishing its own microbial strain library.

Manufacturing platform: Unknown operates China's first microbiome drug production facility built to US FDA standards.

Unknown has already launched clinical studies in collaboration with renowned medical institutions including Peking University Cancer Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, and has established multiple research partnerships in microbiology with Tsinghua University Shenzhen Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology Synthetic Biology Institute, and Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Microbiome therapeutics is an emerging trend that has developed in the international pharmaceutical industry in recent years, demonstrating tremendous potential particularly in complex and chronic diseases," said Dr. Yan Tan, founder and CEO of Unknown. "Because data on gut microorganisms and their interactions with the human body is multi-omics, multi-dimensional, and highly complex, leveraging the rapidly advancing fields of bioinformatics and AI to assist in microbial drug development has become an inevitable trend, making microbiome therapeutics a paradigm for data- and computation-driven drug development. Microbiome therapeutics has already sparked a global wave of enthusiasm. Unknown hopes to take root in China and carve out its own path for the development of China's gut microbiome therapeutics industry."

Gaorong Ventures commented: "Gut microbiome stability is critical to human health, and microbial drugs represent an entirely new field with enormous market potential. Unknown's innovative approach to gut microbiome drug development, built on AI and bioengineering technologies, puts it at the forefront of global drug development efficiency. Gaorong has been closely following the disruptive role of AI in the pharmaceutical industry, and AI-powered microbiome therapeutics is at an inflection point poised for explosive growth. We look forward to Unknown leveraging advanced technologies to precisely manage the gut health of Chinese people and create a better life through science and technology."

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