Human Cells to be Cloned with AI: Huayuan Zhiyin Receives Seed Funding of Tens of Millions of Yuan

AI-driven virtual cell (AIVC) startup Huayuan Zhiyin (华源智因) has successfully completed a significant seed funding round in the amount of tens of millions of Yuan. This round was led by Shuimu Venture Capital, and the company plans to use the secured funds to develop foundational multi-modal sequencing technologies. Additionally, expanding the team and increasing collaborations with top-tier hospitals (third-class hospitals) in Çin are among the main objectives of this financing. The company's founding team consists of experienced pharmaceutical industry professionals and computational biology researchers. In the scientific advisory boards, experts from established institutions such as Shenzhen Ulusal Gen Bankası serve, creating a robust structure that bridges science and industry. The company's success in this initial funding round has also accelerated its plans to initiate the next investment round.

The traditional new drug development process stands out as an extremely challenging field, known to require a decade of time and massive budgets of on milyar dolar. Approximately ninety percent of this massive investment is spent on human clinical trials, where the risk of failure is highest. However, only about ten percent of the candidate drugs that undergo these clinical trials can successfully complete all stages and reach the market. The most fundamental reason for this incredibly high failure rate is the massive gap between the results of animal experiments used in laboratory settings and human physiology. The Huayuan Zhiyin team offers a solution to calculate the drug's effects on the human body in advance before starting milyonlarca dolarlık clinical trials.

According to Huayuan Zhiyin's CEO Runshi Du, most current AI-supported drug companies focus only on the very beginning of the process, namely finding potential disease targets and generating chemical compounds. However, this only accelerates the initial step of drug discovery and cannot predict the actual efficacy or side effects of the drug on a real human. The critical problem that needs to be solved is predicting whether a developed drug is worth investing in for human trials. To solve this problem, the company has developed a cell-drug interaction model called 'Wise-Perturb', focusing specifically on predicting the real efficacy of drugs in the human body. This innovative approach aims to radically change drug development processes by going beyond the standard methods in the industry.

The biggest advantage of the Wise-Perturb model developed by the company is that, unlike traditional methods, it does not rely solely on a single RNA sequence and takes into account the pathological features of real patients. Human cells contain approximately twenty thousand protein-coding genes, and the health status of the cell, the progression of diseases, and the responses to drugs are shaped by the complex interaction of these genes. Traditional models generally use cell lines produced in a laboratory environment that lack the human's natural micro-environment, which leads to serious deviations in drug efficacy predictions. Huayuan Zhiyin, on the other hand, is establishing a multi-modal integration system that can analyze multiple data such as DNA, RNA, and proteins from a single cell simultaneously. Through this, the company builds a robust three-layer data infrastructure, ranging from massive general datasets at the bottom to rare clinical tumor data at the top.

Another groundbreaking feature of the company's technology is the model's ability to recognize different cell types thanks to its cell-specific design. In reality, a drug can be beneficial in the lungs while simultaneously causing severe damage to the liver, and this model can instantly detect these differences. Huayuan Zhiyin has proven that its model, trained with breast cancer data, can accurately predict drug effects even in ovarian cancer types it has never seen before, using zero-shot prediction. Thanks to this proven clinical success, the company breaks away from the traditional 'first do high-cost R&D, then find customers' cycle in the industry. Having already signed real paid projects by making agreements with many top-tier hospitals, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and biotechnology firms, the company keeps its finger on the pulse of the industry in the fields of preclinical evaluation and the identification of new drug targets.