Founded in 2014 by a group of quantum
physicists at MIT, XtalPi is a computation-driven pharmaceutical
R&D technology company that focuses on addressing the longstanding research
challenges in key aspects of drug discovery and development. Its cutting-edge
technologies, innovative solutions, and diverse applications across the
pharmaceutical value chain have helped it gain industry approval and establish
strategic partnerships with top international pharmaceutical companies.
Ma is the co-founder and CEO of XtalPi. The
company is focused on integrating quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and
cloud computing technologies to provide new and improved research methods and
solutions as key steps in drug discovery and pre-clinical research to significantly improve the efficiency, accuracy, and success rate of pharmaceutical
research and development.
Ma and his team developed the Intelligent
Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform, which leverages tightly
interwoven quantum physics, computational chemistry, artificial intelligence,
and machine learning algorithms as well as large-scale high-performance cloud
computing. The ID4 platform offers a variety of innovative pharmaceutical research
technologies, including a drug small-molecule general force field, customized
proprietary force fields, crystal free energy predictions, free energy
perturbation calculations, and several other important technical methods,
including the analysis of the crystal structure of electron microscopes, to improve
the drug development process.
XtalPi is offering a variety of services in
drug solid-state research and development, drug discovery and design, as well
as customized artificial intelligence model development. It has served more
than 40 top pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, and accelerated the
research and development of over 100 drug pipelines.
According to Ma, XtalPi has raised over $60
million from investors including China Life Healthcare Fund, Sequoia China,
Tencent, and Google, which places it among top-funded AI drug R&D companies
in the world.
Ma attributes XtalPi's success to its
ability to outperform competitors in traditionally challenging areas such as
crystal structure prediction. Its solutions have a proven record of high-accuracy,
reliability, and a significantly shortened research cycle, which all contribute
to increased research efficiency and success rate. In the case of drug
discovery, how can artificial intelligence quickly and reliably identify
promising compounds from millions of potentially useful chemical structures it
has generated? This is where quantum chemistry comes in. With a combination of
AI and quantum chemistry, XtalPi can significantly expand its search area for
candidate molecules, then use high-accuracy calculations to predict their
potency against the desired drug targets, and evaluate their overall development
potential based on their predicted physicochemical and pharmaceutical characteristics.
Based on these computational insights and predictions, XtalPi's hopes to boost
the overall efficiency and success rate of these drug projects.
