Insilico Medicine’s shares rose 5.6% in Hong Kong trading on Monday, surging after the deal was announced at midday local time. The firm’s shares have risen by 35% since its IPO in late December. SK Biopharmaceuticals’ shares dropped 1.7% on Monday, building on a 30% decline for the year thus far.
“By combining Insilico’s AI-powered drug discovery platform with SK Biopharmaceuticals’ clinical development and U.S. commercialization capabilities, we believe we can accelerate the discovery of innovative CNS [central nervous system] therapies for patients,” Donghoon Lee, president and CEO of SK Biopharmaceuticals, said in a statement. “We see this collaboration as a scalable and repeatable growth platform that can be leveraged for future target discovery and development opportunities.”
“Korea now has substantial resources driven by the boom in AI. Now, that innovation is flowing into pharmaceuticals,” Zhavoronkov says. “More Korean companies will try to play a bigger role in pharmaceutical research and development, clinical trials, manufacturing, and sales.”
“Korean companies are a bit more adventurous,” Zhavoronkov adds. “They’re willing to take a little bit more risk to get ultrahigh novelty,” particularly in neuroimmunology, which, he projects, could become a “trillion-dollar opportunity.”
Insilico’s model is to use AI to more rapidly discover and develop new drug candidates, screening vast numbers of molecules before moving to clinical trials. The company, which was founded in Boston and maintains offices in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi, has multiple drugs in trials, including one targeting idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a condition where scar tissue forms in the lungs, that’s currently in the Phase II stage.
Insilico is also riding a broader boom in Asian, and particularly Chinese, biotech. China now accounts for roughly a third of the innovative molecules in global drug pipelines and attracts about three‑quarters of Asia’s biotech venture funding, according to a report from ING released last week.
“If you use China as a platform, you’re going to gain two years of speed at the preclinical level,” Zhavoronkov explains.
