Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma Raises Tens of Millions of RMB in Angel Round, AI Powers Gene-Editing Therapeutics
Dedicated to establishing a complete, end-to-end pipeline for applying AI technology in gene therapy.
Recently, Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma (Hangzhou) Gene Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Westlake Valley") announced the completion of a tens-of-millions-of-yuan angel funding round led by Gaorong Ventures. The proceeds will primarily accelerate the company's AI technology development in gene-editing therapeutics and advance the build-out of its core CRISPR therapy R&D platform.
Focused on gene-editing therapeutics, Westlake Valley is pursuing cutting-edge technology development that iterates between high-throughput biotech data production and deep learning model building, while constructing AIdit, an original-technology-driven gene-editing therapy development platform. The company aims to pioneer the full workflow for deploying artificial intelligence in gene therapy.
In recent years, gene-editing technology has attracted considerable attention. Among these, the third-generation gene-editing technology — CRISPR — has been dubbed the "gene scissors." CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) refers to a special sequence in genomic DNA, originating from an acquired immune system in bacteria that can identify viruses invading the bacterium and destroy them through key enzymes. When encountering the same viral invasion again, bacteria can recognize the virus based on stored fragments and cut the viral DNA to neutralize it. Scientists leveraging this technology can efficiently and precisely edit specific target genes in an organism's genome, thereby helping to cure diseases. CRISPR has thus become the most widely adopted gene-editing technology globally.
Popular science video: About CRISPR technology
Currently, the application of CRISPR technology in therapeutics still faces challenges regarding safety and efficacy. By reframing biomedical problems in the gene-editing process as computational biology problems, artificial intelligence can help advance CRISPR technology.
Dr. Lijia Ma, founder of Westlake Valley, heads the Functional Genomics and Bioinformatics Laboratory at Westlake University. Dr. Ma earned her PhD from the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago's Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. She has long specialized in large-scale genomics and transcriptomics research, and previously led multiple major genomics projects at BGI.
Westlake Valley has assembled an interdisciplinary team spanning genomics, deep learning, cell biology, and immunology. The company is currently developing a series of deep learning models to optimize key steps in gene therapy using AI technology.
Dr. Ma stated, "Life science is at an inflection point, transitioning from experimental science to experimental plus data science. As a scientist with dual backgrounds in biomedicine and data science, I feel privileged to be in this golden age of scientific and technological development. The 3 billion base pairs of the human genome are often compared to a genetic code. Westlake Valley's mission is to establish a new Biotech-plus-AI paradigm for biopharmaceutical development — to find problems in this genetic code and correct them through gene editing. In the future, gene-editing drugs will undoubtedly join traditional small-molecule and macromolecule drugs as important guardians of human health."
A Gaorong Ventures project lead commented, "CRISPR-based gene-editing technology has been at the frontier and center of biotech R&D since its inception. Scientists have been eager to deploy this 'gene magic scissors' in disease treatment as quickly as possible, and have made several forward-looking attempts. However, gene-editing technology remains relatively immature at this stage and is evolving rapidly as our understanding deepens. How to rapidly and comprehensively optimize and enhance gene-editing systems is a prerequisite and key to whether gene-editing technology can fully advance into the disease treatment arena. AI methods based on biological big data precisely offer a solution to this challenge. The Westlake Valley team has years of accumulated expertise in producing and interpreting high-throughput, high-precision, high-dimensional biological big data, and has recently achieved breakthrough progress in optimizing key steps of gene editing through its AI platform AIdit. We look forward with great anticipation to Dr. Ma's team comprehensively and holistically optimizing gene-editing technology through AI, and rapidly advancing their R&D into the disease treatment field."
About Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma
Founded in 2021, Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma is a technology transfer project from Dr. Lijia Ma's laboratory at Westlake University's School of Life Sciences. The company is located in Hangzhou's Xihu District Yunqi Town, home to Westlake University's Yunqi campus. Westlake Valley Intelligent Pharma is committed to becoming the world's first platform-based biopharmaceutical company to fully implement AI technology in gene-editing therapeutics. Driven by technological innovation, the company aims to improve the druggability efficiency and capabilities of gene-editing therapies, establish AI-enabled workflows across the full CRISPR drug development pipeline, and explore uncharted territory in gene-editing therapeutics.
