htmlOn September 9, the domestic biocomputing platform company Baitu Biotech held the opening ceremony of the Beijing Central Laboratory and the strategic communication meeting on immune robots. Experts such as Dong Chen , Zhan Qimin , Xu Huji, Hu Xiaoyu, Song Le and other experts attended the meeting.
At the meeting, Baitu Biotechnology announced that the Beijing Central Laboratory, namely the Beren Laboratory, was officially completed and started operation. This is another large-scale R&D center built by Baitu Biotechnology after the 6,000-square-meter laboratory of the R&D Center of Suzhou Industrial Park.
At this laboratory completion ceremony, Baitu Shengke also released the "ImmuBot" immune robot strategy. According to official interpretation, ImmuBot is a new protein drug designed through the biological computing engine de novo, which can realize complex mechanisms of action that cannot be achieved by traditional antibody drugs, and is expected to provide new solutions for a large number of unmet clinical needs.
"The human immune system is very complex, and there is still a lot of room for current drug development for immune diseases. This is one of the most promising directions in the future. This field is very much needed for the modeling abstraction ability brought by biological computing . Now, we have also made more clear about our goal as a biological computing platform company, that is, decoding immunity with biological computing. " said Liu Wei, co-founder and CEO of Baitu Shengke .
▲ map | Liu Wei, co-founder and CEO of Baitu Biotechnology (Source: provided by the interviewee)
It is reported that Baitu Biotechnology plans to develop "ImmuBot" immune robots and reprogram the immune system through Baitu Zhidao (DAO), thereby batch-based First-in-Class drug development.
is building a closed-loop capability for dry and wet experiments
"Last year, our team had only about 30 people, and now the team size has increased by nearly 300 people. At that time, we were still renting offices and laboratories, and now we have established laboratories in Beijing and Suzhou that can support self-development and collaborators' research and development." Liu Wei recalled.
The Beijing Central Laboratory, which was officially completed this time, is a 5-story single-family life science research and development building with an area of about 5,000 square meters. It has a large-scale high-throughput automation verification laboratory, CLIA standard oscillary laboratory, microfluidic chip etching/lithography laboratory, and optical technology laboratory. It is also planned to achieve high-throughput dry and wet closed-loop target discovery and other high-throughput CRISPR systems, organoid systems, microfluidic systems, and computing optical systems independently developed.
Liu Wei admitted that during the laboratory construction process, due to the research and development of many cutting-edge underlying technologies and the needs of big data and high-speed computing, many designs in the laboratory are different from those in the standard laboratories, and many designs have been repeatedly modified during this period.
It is reported that the Beijing Central Laboratory will provide technical services for projects such as Baitu Biotech 's self-developed project and "Immune Map Excellence Program" for cooperative ecological partners.
▲ map | Baitu Biotechnology Beijing Center Laboratory (Source: Provided by the interviewee)
As early as July this year, Baitu Biotechnology Suzhou R&D Center was officially launched. The positioning of Suzhou R&D Center is to develop a macromolecular drug R&D biocomputing engine.The official press release pointed out that the R&D center has the ability to experiment with high-throughput macromolecular drugs, covering all aspects of drug molecular discovery and screening, verification, engineering and protein science, and can realize billions of protein interaction experiments, as well as various experiments such as tens of thousands of protein expression, purification and property determination every year. It is reported that these experimental capabilities of can form key capabilities of high-throughput wet and dry closed loops together with large-scale computing models.
"The high-throughput laboratory in Beijing and the Suzhou R&D Center laboratory combined have tens of thousands of square meters. This volume may be the size of a large CRO laboratory. But we don't do CRO, it is entirely to produce data for ourselves. Because the AI model is generally highly data-consuming, and it also requires new and cutting-edge data capabilities," said Liu Wei.
On this basis, the company is building a large-scale high-throughput immune experimental system (which can be understood as an organoid of the immune system). It is reported that , a high-throughput immune simulation experimental system, is a very important core link in the entire high-throughput dry and wet experiment closed loop, and is expected to generate hundreds of millions of real-world data every year.
"Using these biological and computing technologies, we can change the model that drives drug research and development, while simultaneously promoting dozens of drug research and development projects in parallel." Liu Wei continued to add.
Take immune robots as an example. These immune robots have many components that can design different combinations. Then, multiple parameters of these immune robots are evaluated through biological computing engines, and high-throughput tests are conducted through protein printing, and multiple iterative cycles are performed to screen out the best-performing immune robot drugs.
▲ Figure | "ImmuBot" Immune Robot (Source: Provided by the interviewee)
"This is also a core concept of our high-throughput wet and dry closed loop. Before dry experiments, we first design some candidate drugs through space design, and then conduct multiple rounds of closed loop iterations through wet experiments."
Liu Wei further pointed out that, overall, the biological computing engine established by Baitu Biotechnology includes three major infrastructures: an immune map based on trillion relationships, and training AI with hundreds of billion parameters The big model finally realizes a closed loop through an immune experimental system of 100 million.
proposed an immune robot strategy, and has promoted more than 50 projects.
After more than a year of exploration and verification, Baitu Shengke has firmly determined the goal of decoding the immune , and has basically determined a major strategic direction, which can be simply summarized as "ImmuBot" immune robot. As mentioned above, immune robots are an innovative de novo design protein drugs that can decode and reprogram the immune system.
Liu Wei told Shenghui that immune robots are a bit like Lego building blocks , and are made up of multiple components. The goal is to achieve the de novo design, thereby conducting drug design in a virtual space based on biological computing that is large amino acid arrangement combination.
According to the official introduction, immune robot has 4 innovative points, which can realize a complex mechanism of action that cannot be achieved by traditional antibody drugs. First, this type of new protein drug has higher warhead performance, which can greatly improve safety and effectiveness; second, the combination can be multi-targeted to achieve precise targeting, immune cell recruitment, and prevent drug resistance escape; third, programming control can be selectively activated in a specific tumor microenvironment, accurately programmed from the program immune system; fourth, component assembly, to increase the efficiency of overall drug development by 10-100 times.
▲ Figure | Immune robots have 4 innovations (Source: provided by the interviewee)
From the perspective of drug asset portfolio, the company may target more than 100 targets through self-development and cooperation methods, including many FIC targets. Public information shows that Baitu Biotech has launched more than 50 ImmuBot-related targets, components and drug pipelines, and its indications cover many tumors such as gastric cancer , liver cancer , colorectal cancer, and many autoimmune and fibrotic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease , NASH. Among them, there are more than 10 self-developed drug pipelines, and the overall stage is currently in the preclinical verification stage.
Liu Wei pointed out that some pipelines will enter the IND stage this year, and it is expected that the fastest-progressing drugs will enter the clinical verification stage next year. After these drugs enter clinical practice, they will help further verify the feasibility of the configuration of immune robots.
AI The big model-driven biological computing engine is the core of the entire immune robot research and development process and the company's lowest infrastructure. In Liu Wei's view, this is the idea of the founding of Baitu Biotechnology , that is, to use a breakthrough new cutting-edge technology or large scientific device to model the immune system, and to use the integrated logic of dry and wet closed-loop to achieve new target discovery and de novo drug design.
Liu Wei also revealed that Baitu Biotech has established the world's largest biological supercomputing center through cooperation with Baidu , which has improved computing power support, and has also built the largest biological pre-training model of .
On the other hand, the company is also building a large-scale outstanding developer ecosystem and jointly developing innovative drugs. In May 2021, Baitu Biotech launched the "Immune Map Excellence Program" for the first time, cooperating with academic institutions, clinical hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc., and has launched dozens of outstanding developer cooperation projects.
▲ map | Baitu Biotechnology Cooperation Network (Source: Provided by the interviewee)
"Over the past year, we have made great progress in the progress of team, core technology, and assets. company will select high-quality investors to conduct a new round of financing at a time, and promote a batch of innovations in the next 3-5 years. The ImmuBot pipeline enters the clinical and subsequent stages. " Liu Wei concluded.
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