Insilico Medicine Raises $60M in Series D Financing

Insilico Medicine, a NYC-based clinical-stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company, raised $60m in Series D financing.

New investors, including a large, diversified asset management firm on the US West Coast and BHR Partners joined the round, along with current investors, including lead investor of Series C financing round Warburg Pincus, B Capital Group, Qiming Venture Partners, BOLD Capital Partners and Pavilion Capital. Insilico’s founder and CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, also invested in the Series D round.

The company intends to use the funds to further bolster its financial position and accelerate the growth of its advancing pipeline, including its lead program which is currently in a Phase I study, and continued development of its Pharma.AI platform. The proceeds will also fund ongoing global expansion and planned strategic initiatives, including a fully automated, AI-driven robotic drug discovery laboratory, and fully robotic biological data factory to complement Insilico’s vast curated data assets.

Led by Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and CEO, Insilico Medicine is a clinical stage end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery company connecting biology, chemistry, and clinical trials analysis using next-generation AI systems. The company has developed AI platforms that utilize deep generative models, reinforcement learning, transformers, and other modern machine learning techniques to discover novel targets and to design novel molecular structures with desired properties.

Since the previous round of financing, Insilico has developed a growing portfolio in frontier areas empowered by its proprietary AI platform. Seven programs in its internal pipeline have progressed to the IND-enabling stage, including a novel 3CL protease inhibitor for COVID-19 treatment, and two synthetic lethality programs targeting MAT2A and USP1 for oncology. It also completed a Phase 0 microdose study and entered a Phase I clinical trial with its first internally developed program targeting fibrosis.

The company has also expanded its collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry through co-development and software licensing deals with a number of major pharmaceutical companies. Since the launch of its PandaOmics™ and Chemistry42™ in late 2020, nine out of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies have licensed Insilico’s AI platforms. In 2022, Insilico signed a multi-asset partnership deal with Fosun Pharma in January, and a drug discovery co-development deal with EQRx in March. Notably, Insilico achieved its first major milestone and nominated a preclinical candidate for the QPCTL program for cancer immunotherapy in less than 40 days into the strategic collaboration with Fosun Pharma.

FinSMEs

06/06/2022