Xunming Biotech completes $35 million Series A+ financing, and its first antibody drug is about to enter clinical trials | Exclusive from 36Kr

Text by | Hu Xiangyun

Edited by | Hai Ruojing

36Kr learned that Aureka Biotechnologies recently completed a $35 million Series A+ financing round. This round of financing was led by Sequoia Capital China, with participation from Matrix Partners China and Boyuan Capital. Existing shareholders such as Wuyuan Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, and New Leaf Capital continued to increase their investments.

At the end of last year, Aureka Biotechnologies received a Series A financing of tens of millions of dollars Series A financing. As of now, the cumulative amount of the company's Series A financing has approached $100 million.

Aureka Biotechnologies stated that the funds raised in this round will be used to promote the construction of its self-developed innovative functional antibody design platform AuraIDE™, strengthen the construction of the base model and agent capabilities, improve the high-throughput and high-content experimental platform facilities, and further streamline the key links from project initiation, molecular design to transformation and implementation of agents.

In the three years since its establishment in 2023, Aureka Biotechnologies has advanced from building a generative antibody drug R & D platform, promoting the in - depth participation of agents in drug molecular design and development, to scaling up this capability. Zhao Weian, the founder and CEO of Aureka Biotechnologies, believes that the new problem facing the company now is how to build "supporting infrastructure" for this system to more quickly complete the process of verifying the actual effects of new targets and new molecules designed by agents. This directly affects the commercialization ability of intelligent pharmaceutical companies.

In Zhao Weian's view, the reason why general large - model manufacturers are more capable is that their long - built infrastructure capabilities can quickly verify the value of innovation and form real feedback. However, in the pharmaceutical industry, the verification cycle of traditional drug R & D often lasts 5 - 10 years. Under this logic, the model will lack effective feedback for a long time, leading to distorted iteration.

Therefore, Aureka Biotechnologies hopes to combine its previous wet - lab platform capabilities to build a set of infrastructure that can form a rapid iterative feedback loop with the large biotech models, providing a more efficient evaluation mode for the "progress" of the models. This system mainly consists of three parts:

First, at the biochemical level. It is reported that in the design of standard target molecules, Aureka Biotechnologies' delivery efficiency is "about 50% higher" than that of traditional wet - lab experiments, and the verification cycle can be compressed to about three weeks.

Second, it is the infrastructure for the design of functional antibodies at the cellular function level. Zhao Weian believes that this is also the core advantage of Aureka Biotechnologies at this stage. "The ultimate value of drugs lies in functional molecules. However, most companies only focus on the binding problem when designing molecules. Relying on the high - throughput microfluidic system, we can scale - up the characterization of complex drug functions such as agonistic activity, endocytosis, and brain penetration, which are difficult to quickly evaluate by traditional experimental methods, and generally complete it within six weeks."

Finally, it comes to the level of drug pipeline data packages for commercial transactions. Currently, Aureka Biotechnologies can complete the delivery of a full - set of commercial data packages including somatic cells, mice, pre - CMC, and pre - toxicology from project initiation within 9 - 12 months.

Zhao Weian admitted that as a startup mainly relying on BD transactions to achieve a commercial closed - loop, the ability to "quickly deliver differentiated functional new molecules" is a key bargaining chip for the company when negotiating cooperation with buyers such as multinational pharmaceutical companies.

"We believe that in future new drug R & D, about 90% of the demand will be concentrated on the development of special functional molecules that are difficult to achieve by traditional methods. Therefore, we focus on two categories. First, the R & D of targets that cannot be completed by traditional animal immunization and library screening. Second, for known mature targets, we mainly target the directions where there are clinically unmet needs (such as insufficient efficacy, toxicity, off - target, etc.) in existing marketed drugs and are difficult to solve by traditional research methods."

For example, in cooperation with a top 5 multinational pharmaceutical company, Aureka Biotechnologies completed the development of three projects for traditionally difficult - to - drug targets for the other party within two months, including a GPCR (G - protein - coupled receptor) target product. This type of target has a low expression level on the cell membrane and complex conformational regulation, and it is difficult to prepare qualified immunogens by traditional immunization methods, so it is difficult to develop corresponding drugs. However, Aureka Biotechnologies can directly screen functional molecules in the natural cellular environment through the functional screening platform combined with agents to complete project delivery.

It is understood that in the past two years, Aureka Biotechnologies has reached BD or NewCo cooperation with multiple multinational pharmaceutical companies and investment institutions and achieved revenues in the tens of millions of dollars.

In addition, in terms of self - developed pipelines, Aureka Biotechnologies mainly focuses on three major disease areas: cardiovascular metabolism, immunity, and the central nervous system. Currently, there are 8 pipelines under research. Two projects are expected to enter the clinical application stage by the end of this year and officially launch the first human clinical trial in the first quarter of next year, and another four projects will complete the PCC (pre - clinical candidate compound) stage by the end of this year.

"We are one of the few companies in the industry that can prove that our core pipelines are completely designed by agents, and we can fully display the original data to prove that the improvement of the biological basic model capabilities can directly correspond to the improvement of drug value. For primary - market investors, this is a relatively important characteristic, which means that a company may have stronger growth potential, and this also gives us a considerable valuation premium space." Zhao Weian said.