Biomap, a biotechnology start-up co-established by Baidu founder Robin Li Yanhong and backed by the Hong Kong authorities, says it has surpassed Alphabet subsidiary AlphaFold in commercialising synthetic intelligence basis fashions for drug discovery.
Multinational pharmaceutical corporations have been seeing a “reverse” within the technological hole between Biomap and AlphaFold, Wei Liu, co-founder and CEO of Biomap and former CEO of Baidu Ventures, mentioned in an interview with the South China Morning Put up.
“There isn’t any absolute winner in AI benchmark exams, however by way of commercialisation and tasks developed primarily based on our fashions, I feel we’re forward of AlphaFold,” mentioned Wei. Nonetheless, AlphaFold had “higher tutorial affect”, he added.
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Developed by London-based DeepMind – owned by Google’s father or mother firm, Alphabet – AlphaFold is extensively thought-about the worldwide chief in utilizing AI to analyse and predict molecular buildings and interactions to find new therapies.
Biomap is a part of a rising cohort of Chinese language corporations, together with start-ups and main tech corporations like TikTok proprietor ByteDance, which are difficult AlphaFold within the quickly evolving area. ByteDance has developed Protenix, a molecular construction prediction mannequin.
Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong is a co-founder of Biomap. Picture: EPA-EFE alt=Baidu CEO Robin Li Yanhong is a co-founder of Biomap. Picture: EPA-EFE>
Biomap reported final 12 months that its xTrimo fashions demonstrated higher accuracy than AlphaFold 3 in figuring out interactions between 70 antibodies and 44 single-domain antibodies with their targets.
Established in 2020, Biomap secured funding from the government-owned Hong Kong Funding Company (HKIC) in June final 12 months.
The partnership sought to boost town’s biotech ecosystem by an accelerator programme referred to as BioMap InnoHub, which incubated greater than 10 tasks and two corporations, with the aim of increasing to greater than 50 tasks and 20 corporations by 2030, Liu mentioned at an occasion co-hosted by the HKIC on Monday.
On Monday, Biomap additionally introduced the co-founding of a brand new firm in Hong Kong centered on bringing new medicine to market, furthering its commercialisation efforts.
BioGend Science – co-established with Legend Capital, a enterprise capital subsidiary of Lenovo Group’s father or mother Legend Holdings – would develop a number of drug pipelines utilizing Biomap’s AI platform and Hong Kong’s analysis and scientific sources, Liu mentioned in a speech.