On 1 July, a research team led by Mingzhen Li, director of the rural and social development institute at the Zhejiang Science and Technology Information Research Institute, visited Westlake Pharmaceuticals. The visit aimed to understand the latest progress in applying AI to drug discovery and to discuss how to release the potential of AI-driven pharma and support high-quality growth in the sector.
Dr. Jing Huang, one of the company’s founders, Dr. Dongdong Liang, Chief Operating Officer, and members of the R&D team took part.
The team toured the company’s core laboratories and AI-related equipment, and heard about its overall development and current research directions. At the meeting that followed, the company explained in detail how AI speeds up and improves drug discovery, and shared its view of where the field is heading.
Building on that hands-on experience, Westlake Pharmaceuticals launched its AI drug discovery platform WAND (Westlake AI for Novel Drug) last year. WAND combines physics-inspired AI with structural biology, medicinal chemistry and biochemistry to upgrade the discovery paradigm, making drug discovery more precise, faster and cheaper. The platform is rooted in the team’s academic depth: a deep understanding of underlying science is what allows the team to design and drive an AI platform.
WAND is now applied across the company’s pipeline with initial breakthroughs. In core programmes, deep use of AI has delivered higher efficiency than conventional routes.
The visit gave the company valuable perspective and a renewed sense of the province’s commitment to new productive forces. Westlake Pharmaceuticals will continue to deepen work on core AI drug discovery technology and, with academic and industry partners, keep exploring efficient and precise routes to new medicines.