Last week, “Innovative DNA of Chinese biomanufacturing”, a joint production by the broadcasters of Shijiazhuang, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Chengdu and Guangzhou, went on air. Set against a decade of progress in China’s innovative drugs, the series looks at innovation practice in the five cities’ national bio-industry bases and decodes the landscape through typical cases.
Westlake Pharmaceuticals was one of those cases, adding a vivid footnote to Hangzhou’s biopharmaceutical innovation.
In the report, Hangzhou TV followed the discovery of Westlake Pharmaceuticals’ first investigational drug, Mprosevir®, in detail. Mprosevir® has a self-developed, entirely new scaffold. It took the team about three years from first discovery to completed clinical trials — far faster than tradition. Its discovery deeply integrated DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening with artificial intelligence, with the two approaches cross-checking each other to raise efficiency.
Working with internationally leading DEL technology, the team screened billions of compounds, then used transfer learning and pretrained models to learn from small datasets, overcoming the false positives that flood DEL results and locking on to compounds with strong drug-like potential quickly. That path shortened timelines markedly and cut development cost.
The story also ran on Hangzhou TV’s evening news as “Hangzhou team rewrites the ten-year rule of drug discovery with AI”.
Westlake Pharmaceuticals has distilled the essence of that model into WAND (Westlake AI for Novel Drug), covering target discovery, molecule generation and molecule optimisation. WAND is now applied across the company’s pipeline. The company will keep iterating the platform and looks forward to working with industry partners on the high-quality development of China’s biopharmaceutical sector.