Medicine with AI! Li Yanhong formally established a life science company, with the help of Baidu Capital, more than a dozen doctors have joined

Author | Li Shuaifei

After 20 years of taking root in the Internet, Baidu officially entered the biological sciences!

The leader is Robin Li himself.

On September 25th, Leifeng.com noticed from Baidu Encyclopedia that a life science platform company named "BioMap" (abbreviated as BioMap in English) announced its establishment; among them, Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Li Yanhong decided to take the lead. Founder and chairman of the company.

Meanwhile, Liu Wei, CEO of Baidu Ventures, will serve as CEO of the company.

The establishment of this company can be regarded as Baidu's fierce attack on biological science.

What kind of company is Baatu Biotech?

According to Baidu Encyclopedia, Baitu Biotech is China's first life science platform company driven by biocomputing technology, and is committed to using high-performance biocomputing and multi-omics data technology to accelerate precision life sciences such as innovative drugs and early screening and diagnosis. The research and development of products strives to make more diseases early warning, controllable and curable.

The company stated that its mission is: to use biological computing technology to drive the development of life sciences - Leveraging Data To Improve Lives. Radically.

According to the official introduction, in the name "Baitu", "Bai" refers to the human's long-standing dream of a hundred years of health, and also reflects the origin of the company's creation of a biological computing platform based on Baidu's AI underlying capabilities. In the era of rapidly growing biological data, provide better biological maps (Bio Map) for the industry.

At the business level, the development of Baitu Biological Sciences will be divided into two stages:

• The first stage: use cutting-edge AI technology to build a complete biocomputing platform, and join hands with start-ups and research institutions that provide new data axes, new data analysis, and drug design tools to build a biocomputing ecosystem for life science companies and Scientific research users provide a wealth of tool capabilities and complete solutions to provide good services.

• The second stage: deeply participate in or lead the development of new precision drugs and precision diagnostic products, and work with partners to contribute innovative precision life science products to the society.

According to the official statement, based on the biological computing platform, Baitu Biological Sciences will also invest heavily in the research and development of key underlying data equipment and computing technology to accelerate the development of high-throughput organoid chips, high-resolution material observation equipment, and new omics collection and analysis equipment. The research and development of special chips for protein simulation and biological computing will bring new data axes and computing capabilities to the life science industry, and realize the independent control of these key common platform technologies.

In addition, in terms of business model, Baitu Biotech will innovate the traditional profit model of life science companies.

From the perspective of the global market, the large-scale R&D model in which companies spend huge sums of money to establish R&D centers has become a thing of the past. The popular trend in recent years is the VIC model, which is a new drug research and development model that combines "VC (venture investment) + IP (intellectual property) + CRO (R&D outsourcing services)". Many innovative pharmaceutical companies import products from outside, and at the same time entrust CRO companies to carry out regional or global development.

On the basis of this model, Baitu Biotech proposed the "VIP" model, using capital (Venture) + participating in the creation of IP + biocomputing and intelligent experiment platform (Platform) to accelerate the generation and transformation of IP in drugs and diagnostic pipelines—— This may become the core value and source of profit of Baitu Biocomputing Platform.

There is no doubt that Baitu Biological Sciences is a new tentacles of Baidu's ecology.

In terms of business, Baidu also made it clear that Baitu Biotech will establish an in-depth strategic cooperation with Baidu’s underlying deep learning algorithm platform Flying Paddle, and Flying Paddle will provide Baitu Biotech with world-class AI underlying technology and development tools. At the same time, the two parties will continue to introduce new algorithms and tools based on the iterative needs of Biotu Biotech and its customers.

The two parties also stated that they will quickly build an open source platform for the biological computing industry and provide more open source, efficient, and accurate R&D tools for the entire biological industry.

However, rather than saying that this is a cooperation between the two parties, it is better to say that this is Baidu's attempt to use its own AI capabilities to enter the field of biological sciences, and to some extent it is also an attempt to implement Baidu's AI.

In fact, in the field of life sciences, Baidu has already accumulated some experience.

In January 2020, after the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, Baidu Research Institute announced the opening of the linear time algorithm LinearFold-according to the official statement, the LinearFold algorithm can shorten the genome-wide secondary structure prediction of the new coronavirus from 55 minutes to 27 seconds, 120 times faster. It is worth mentioning that during the outbreak in Beijing Xinfadi in June this year, with the help of this algorithm, the disease control department completed the whole genome sequencing of four samples in 10 hours.

Subsequently, Baidu Research Institute launched LinearDesign, the world's first efficient algorithm for optimizing the gene sequence of the new coronavirus mRNA vaccine, which can complete the sequence design within 11 minutes, greatly improving the stability and protein expression level of vaccine design.

It is worth mentioning that in August 2020, Baidu Research Institute announced the establishment of a biological computing laboratory, hoping to deepen the cooperation between academia and biopharmaceutical companies through AI and computing technology, and jointly explore genes, DNA, RNA, and protein molecules. Structure and other human life codes, shorten the new drug development cycle, reduce the cost of new drug development, improve the accuracy of drug and disease matching, and discover the relationship between genes and diseases, so as to achieve precision medicine.

To some extent, the establishment of the Biocomputing Laboratory of Baidu Research Institute is more like a prelude to the establishment of Baitu Biotech.

Interestingly, according to Baidu's introduction, Robin Li himself has been concerned about AI-enabled life science technology for nearly 30 years. He applied for jobs related to bioinformatics research when he was working on Wall Street.

At the same time, Liu Wei, CEO of Baitu Biotech, is actually the CEO of Baidu Ventures.

According to Baidu, since Liu Wei became the CEO of Baidu Ventures in 2017, he has taken biocomputing as the core layout direction of BV, and invested in more than 40 biocomputing companies in China, the United States and Europe, including more than ten companies such as Atomwise. AI drug design companies in different fields and more than 20 new biological data axis companies, covering various frontiers such as nanopore sequencing, single-cell mass spectrometry and molecular imaging, human body sensors, super-resolution imaging, high-throughput 3D pathology, brain-computer interface, etc. direction.

After the establishment of Baitu Biotech, it will also cooperate with the above-mentioned invested companies.

With Baidu's background, Baitu Biotechnology is more like being born with a golden key in its mouth.

According to official information, in addition to Li Yanhong and Liu Wei, the start-up team of Baitu Biological Sciences has more than a dozen life science doctors who graduated from Tsinghua University, Peking University, Oxford, Cambridge, Hong Kong University, UCLA, Stanford and other universities, covering molecular biology. Science, computational chemistry, genomics and other technical directions, as well as a number of professionals with rich investment and business management experience in the fields of biopharmaceuticals and life sciences.

It is worth mentioning that the company has also formed a scientific advisory committee, including professors from many famous research institutions.

Obviously, the current Biosciences of Baitu is still in its infancy and recruiting stage; Baidu has just sounded the clarion call to enter the life sciences - the progress of life sciences and industries has always been a long process, and there is no rush. here.

Hope this time, Robin Li has enough patience.