Source Code Capital portfolio company Galixir announced the completion of a new funding round, with existing shareholder Source Code Capital continuing to increase its stake.

源码资本·August 4, 2021·0·2

Continuously exploring the application of AI technology to empower innovative drug R&D

On August 4, 2021, Galixir announced the completion of a new funding round. The round was led by Shanghai AI Industry Investment Fund, with continued support from all existing shareholders including Gaorong Ventures, Source Code Capital, Redpoint China Ventures, DCM, 5Y Capital, and BAI Capital. Maxceed Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round. Source Code Capital was a co-lead investor in Galixir's Pre-A round and has continued to increase its stake in subsequent rounds.

Currently, Galixir has built its drug discovery platform PyxirTM based on proprietary algorithms combined with domain knowledge, tools, and expertise in medicinal chemistry, computational chemistry, and biology. The platform has been validated and achieved阶段性技术进展. This funding round played an important role in further strengthening the platform's capabilities. The proceeds will be used to advance multiple drug development pipelines, expand the talent pool, and deepen scientific and technological advantages. Galixir will work with its investors to explore the frontiers of new drug discovery and build a global technology enterprise at the intersection of biomedicine and artificial intelligence.

Regarding this funding round, Dr. Chengtao Li, founder and CEO of Galixir, said: "Galixir's vision is 'keeping patients away from pain and making new drugs accessible.' We are delighted to have received continuous support from our investors in the innovative field of AI-driven drug discovery. New drug discovery is a lengthy process, but it is also one that creates value, drives innovation, and benefits patients worldwide. Through the integration of artificial intelligence, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biology, Galixir has found a new path for drug discovery — one that enables faster identification of shining stars in the compound universe capable of curing human diseases, while improving R&D efficiency and success rates through data, algorithms, and computing power, ultimately reducing drug development costs. Galixir has completed the development and construction of its platform and continues to explore more applications of AI technology in biomedicine. We are currently independently developing or jointly advancing more than ten innovative drug pipelines with partners, continuously achieving promising results in in vitro and in vivo experiments. Going forward, Galixir will keep pushing technological boundaries to become a global technology enterprise leading the convergence of biomedicine and artificial intelligence."

Every new drug reaching the market represents more than a decade of arduous R&D and billions of dollars in spending. In reality, over 90% of new drugs never make it to the finish line. Long cycles, high costs, and low success rates are pervasive challenges in the pharmaceutical industry. For decades, many innovators have explored new drug discovery technologies, and the advantages of AI — automation, scalability, and interpretability — have made it an extremely promising new approach to drug design.

Founded in 2019, Galixir is a company that empowers drug development with world-leading artificial intelligence technology. By applying cutting-edge AI algorithms combined with tools and expertise in computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biology, Galixir has established a series of preclinical drug discovery models spanning from target identification to candidate compound generation and screening, compound structure optimization, druggability and toxicity prediction, and patent analysis — compressing the preclinical drug development timeline from the traditional 4-7 years to 12 months or even less.

In a project designing an agonist for an autoimmune target — where traditional computational chemistry methods alone struggled to achieve good results — Galixir applied its proprietary drug discovery platform PyxirTM to conduct de novo design. Through careful screening by AI, computational chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and biology, combined with synthesizability filtering, the company identified three high-activity compounds with novel scaffolds designed by AI within one month. Upon synthesis and testing, all three molecules demonstrated high activity (EC50 below 100 nM), with one candidate showing EC50 below 10 nM and selectivity of approximately 100-fold. After multiple rounds of in vitro validation, this candidate exhibited favorable metabolic stability, absorption/permeability, safety, and efficacy profiles, with no inhibition of CYP or hERG, and observable pharmacological effects at low oral doses. The project is currently undergoing in vivo toxicology evaluation.

Generally speaking, compared to inhibitors, agonists have higher requirements for receptor binding — the molecule must be more specific to produce pharmacological effects. This makes such drugs more difficult to design, requiring balanced coordination of multiple parameters within optimal ranges to achieve desired receptor activation. The fact that all three candidate molecules selected by Galixir from millions of AI-designed virtual molecules demonstrated high activity in preclinical validation is significant; more importantly, the entire process from target-based molecular design to candidate selection took only one month — something traditional computational chemistry methods simply cannot match. This exciting result also demonstrates that Galixir's drug discovery platform PyxirTM can balance multiple indicators simultaneously, efficiently and accurately identifying target molecules with high selectivity and specificity.

Of course, from preliminary preclinical validation to entering clinical stages, drugs designed by AI technology still require further iteration and optimization. However, the ability to dramatically shorten early drug discovery timelines and greatly improve the hit rate for effective molecules already represents a leap forward for the field.

Galixir's work in AI-empowered drug development has opened a new path for drug discovery, and its technical capabilities have gained broad recognition from both industry and academia. The company has established partnerships with multiple multinational pharmaceutical companies, listed drugmakers, biotech firms, and research institutions both domestically and internationally, continuously exploring the frontiers of drug R&D.

Chen Runze of Source Code Capital stated: "Source Code Capital firmly believes in the tremendous potential of combining artificial intelligence technology with massive life science data. The Galixir team has been continuously attracting talent and investing in technology R&D in this interdisciplinary field, making significant progress in platform development and pipeline building. Source Code continues to support Galixir in this new round, expecting the company to keep breaking new ground and inject new technological momentum into the pharmaceutical R&D industry."