Anew Labs

Headlines · 5

1. 2d
   AI pharma's pivotal test: Rentosertib Phase III readout due 2029

   The article reports that Anew Labs, an AI drug-discovery company spun out of ByteDance, raised a $290 million first round at a $1.5 billion valuation, and that Anthropic has reportedly built a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area where Claude drives robots to run real biological experiments. It divides the AI pharma chain into three groups — upstream AI technology firms such as Insilico Medicine, midstream CRO/CDMO wet-lab service providers such as GenScript and Twist Bioscience, and downstream pharma companies including Fosun Pharma and Hengrui Pharmaceuticals — and cites brokerage estimates that AI can cut drug-discovery timelines by 70%-90% and total R&D cost by roughly 50%. The decisive test is Insilico's lead asset Rentosertib, whose Phase IIa showed a 98.4 mL mean lung-capacity gain at 60 mg versus a 20.3 mL decline in controls; its China Phase III began in July 2026 with 320 planned participants and top-line data expected in 2029.

   36氪 人工智能 · 🔥 0
2. 4d
   Shou Zi Chew: AI will rewrite science in three years — ByteDance's bets

   Speaking at DBS Bank's first Asia Future Forward Forum in Singapore on 12 October, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said real scientific breakthroughs in physics, biotechnology, chemistry and materials science will arrive within two to three years thanks to AI, while arguing that humans must stay involved in high-stakes work. The article lays out ByteDance's related moves: in June 2026 it spun out its five-year-old AI-for-Science drug discovery team as Anew Labs, which raised $290 million at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation while ByteDance kept a 56% stake; and its Seed team released Protenix-v2 in April 2026 under Apache 2.0 with open code and weights, which the article says matches or exceeds DeepMind's AlphaFold 3 on several core benchmarks and beats the previous generation's 1,000-seed antibody-antigen results with just five seeds. It also notes ByteDance's September 2026 $29.6 billion three-year bank loan for AI projects outside China, and argues AI4S is now bottlenecked on validation — citing Insilico Medicine's Rentosertib, where AI cut discovery to 18 months but Phase III data are not expected until 2029.

   钛媒体 · 🔥 0
3. 5d
   TikTok CEO Shou Chew predicts an AI-driven science breakthrough within three years

   Speaking on October 12 at DBS Bank's Asia Future Forward Conference in Singapore, TikTok CEO Shou Chew said AI is likely to deliver a real scientific breakthrough within two to three years, naming physics, biotech, chemistry and materials science. He also said people probably overestimate AI in the short term and underestimate it in the long term, and described AI's cybersecurity risks as "quite real," citing users granting agents broad permissions — for example an agent that buys more than intended while rushing to finish a task. He said TikTok's parent ByteDance is exploring how to work with scientists on scientific progress; per a 钛媒体/NextFin account, ByteDance's Seed team released Protenix-v2 for biomolecular structure prediction and design in April, and spun out its AI drug-discovery unit as Anew Labs in June, which later raised $290 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

   CNBC Technology · 🔥 0
4. 6d
   ByteDance AI drug spinout Anew Labs raises $290M angel round

   Anew Labs, which spun out of ByteDance in June 2026, raised a $290 million angel round in September 2026 at a reported valuation of about 10 billion yuan, which the report calls China's first AI drug-discovery company to reach that valuation in a first round. Investors include Sequoia China, IDG Capital, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Five Source Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Primavera Venture Partners and Boyu Capital, with Sino Biopharmaceutical and the Shanghai Future Industry Fund joining as strategic investors; ByteDance remains the controlling shareholder and continues to supply Volcano Engine compute. The company has released biological AI models Protenix and PXDesign along with AnewMind, a scientific reasoning model for drug-development decisions, and lists four preclinical pipeline assets, with a lead oral small-molecule candidate it describes as the world's first to target both IL-17A and IL-17F, currently in preclinical lead optimization. Anew Labs said it is focused on R&D and declined an interview.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0
5. Oct 10
   AI drug design is flooding Chinese labs with wet-lab work

   Anthropic's Claude designed 1,320 binding proteins against a dozen targets, which Adaptyv Bio and Twist synthesized and tested; 354 were confirmed to bind, a hit rate near 30% versus the traditional 10%–15%. The article argues that as AI pushes the marginal cost of molecular design toward zero, the first orders flow to lab-service providers: GenScript's AIDD revenue doubled year over year in H1 with gross margins about 20 points above its traditional protein-expression business, while XtalPi posted 803 million yuan in 2025 revenue, tripled and its first full-year profit. Meanwhile Washington is trying to pull early-stage R&D and clinical capacity back onshore via HHS's TrialBlazer plan and the BIOSECURE Act.

   MIT科技评论中文 · 🔥 0

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