Published on Dec 31, 2025

The new optimism regarding artificial intelligence in drug discovery is not a purely Chinese phenomenon. All around the world, progress in computing power, large models and data handling are rekindling hopes that time and cost savings in early-stage research may finally lead to real-world results.

Insilico, which achieved its long-anticipated blockbuster IPO on December 30, 2025 on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, is a case in point. It is a truly international company. The company has offices in Hong Kong, the US, Canada, Abu Dhabi and Taiwan. Its most exciting activity, however, is currently happening in mainland China.

Phase II clinical studies for the drug candidate Rentosertib have been conducted at 21 sites in China, conducted at 21 sites in China, alongside a limited number of studies in the United States. A spokesperson for Insilico has expressed hope that it may become the world's first fully AI-discovered drug to enter Phase III trials. The world's estimated three million patients suffering from IPF, a chronic lung disease, cannot wait.

Insilico and its partners were able to enrol 71 patients for those studies in China in about one year, while only eight patients could be signed up in the United States, the Chinese business weekly Jingji Guancha Bao reported. (In Chinese).

While both AI-driven drug discovery efforts and the potential markets for their products are global, the excitement in China is particularly obvious. Government, hospital, and research organisations are highly supportive.

Clinical trials move fast. Small biotech companies, generously supported by investors, see a chance to leverage AI and break into an industry which used to be reserved for big pharmaceutical companies alone.

The new spring for AI drug discovery in China is also palpable from the amount of new platforms coming online since the beginning of 2025. The latest major launch was that of the open drug-discovery platform ‘AI Kongming’. It is run by The Global Health Drug Discovery Institute in Beijing and was unveiled on December 11, 2025.

"As a nonprofit organization, our primary aim is to address urgent global health needs neglected by the market and diseases affecting millions worldwide but lacking commercial investment," Ding Sheng, the director of the institute, said in interviews with Chinese reporters.

The basic approach taken by this nonprofit, openly government-backed institute towards AI in medicine is not so different from the one that Insilico is pursuing with its for-profit, proprietary platform "Pharma.AI".

AI Kongming wants to integrate "scattered biological, chemical, and pharmacological knowledge and convert it into AI capabilities that can reason, create, and evolve", Ding said. In other words, both platforms attempt to reduce the tradtional trial-and-error cycle in early drug discovery.

It may be too early to assess the impact of AI on drug discovery overall, but there is clearly a paradigm shift happening, and it is already highly visible in China.

Cross-disciplinary research and a stronger emphasis on collaboration across companies large and small, academia, and government are starting to replace the old model of siloed in-house drug pipelines.

Both the successful IPO of InSilico in Hong Kong and the new open platform AI Kongming in Beijing are part of this interesting evolution.

Investments in industry leaders like InSilico are good news because they increase the chances of the first AI-designed drug becoming available. As the company scales its efforts with the fresh capital it just collected, the effect will be a further acceleration of the convergence of AI and biopharma in China.

This, of course, is a development that has been going on for several years. Chinese scientists and entrepreneurs see a chance to use AI and leapfrog right into cutting-edge, innovative healthcare. “If you are not competing in China, you are not competing at all in some therapeutic modalities like in antibodies, in small molecules,” Alex Zhavoronkov, the CEO of InSilico was quoted by Bloomberg.

At the same time, the Chinese government is backing open platforms like AI Kongming, because it hopes to facilitate a shift of computational drug development from a specialist-dependent tool to scalable scientific infrastructure. Again, it is early days. If we have learned one thing in recent years, however, it is that China is particularly effective at building infrastructure of all kinds.