Insilico Medicine Lists on Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Showing AI Drug Discovery Momentum with 2025's Largest Hong Kong Biotech IPO

HONG KONG, Dec. 30, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Insilico Medicine (3696.HK), a clinical-stage drug discovery and development company driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI), is successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange today, becoming the first AI-driven biotech company to go public in Main Board under Chapter 8.05 listing rules of the HKEX. This initial public offering (IPO) raised a total of HKD 2.277 billion, achieving the largest biotech IPO in Hong Kong this year, as in the size of fundraising.

"With this massively oversubscribed listing we set several world's firsts further confirming Insilico's validated leadership position in AI-powered drug discovery and development and the strength of our platform and pipeline. Insilico is dedicated to extending human productive longevity and this listing provides us with more resources to advance our mission", says Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and CEO, Chief Business Officer of Insilico Medicine. "Over the past few years, we set very clear industry benchmarks demonstrating that AI can help make drug discovery faster, cheaper, and deliver higher success rates in preclinical and early clinical development. We have validated the end-to-end capabilities of AI-empowered programs from novel target discovery to molecular generation, and then to preclinical and clinical stages. Going forward, we will continue to increase investment in our AI platform and innovative pipeline, accelerate the advancement of differentiated innovative programs into clinic, and bring truly accessible, affordable, and breakthrough treatment solutions to patients worldwide."

"Today marks not only an important step forward for Insilico Medicine, but also a new starting point for our deep integration of AI with life sciences and reshaping of the drug development paradigm", says Feng Ren, PhD, Co-CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Insilico Medicine. "With our self-developed AI platform, we have identified innovative targets and novel molecules with first-in-class or best-in-class potential across multiple disease areas, and several programs have already entered clinical development. We believe that the value of AI extends far beyond cost reduction and efficiency gains; it lies in continuously pushing the boundaries of foundational innovation.  Support from the capital markets will help us further enhance our AI platform, expand our pipeline, improve R&D efficiency, and collaborate with global partners to accelerate the translation of innovative medicines. Guided by a long‑term vision and driven by technology, we are committed to transform AI into real productivity that improves human health."

Global Capital Endorsement: AI‑driven Biotech Lands on HKEX

As a global pioneer AI‑driven biotechnology company, Insilico's Hong Kong listing, jointly sponsored by Morgan Stanley, CICC and GF Securities, attracted strong interest and active participation from both local and international investors. A total of 94,690,500 shares were offered globally, with 10% Hong Kong public offering, which was oversubscribed by approximately 1427.37 times, locking in subscription funds of over HKD 328.349 billion and setting a record for Hong Kong public offering subscription amount among non‑18A healthcare IPOs in Hong Kong during the year. The international offering accounted for 90% of the total, and was oversubscribed by 26.27 times, marking the most oversubscribed case in international placement among non‑18A healthcare IPOs in Hong Kong during the year.

In terms of cornerstone, Insilico introduced 15 cornerstone investors globally, including Lilly, Tencent, Temasek, Schroders, UBS AM, Oaktree, E Fund and Taikang Life Insurance, among others, forming an all-star line‑up covering global pharmaceutical leaders, internet giants, international sovereign funds and large asset managers, as well as leading Chinese mutual funds and insurances funds.

Notably, Lilly and Tencent for the first time subscribed as cornerstone investors in a biotechnology company, highlighting cross‑industry leaders' recognition of and confidence in the AI‑driven R&D business. Additionally, Oaktree Capital, a long‑term U.S. investment institution, returned to the Hong Kong biotech market as a cornerstone investor for the first time this year, reflecting its continued optimism about the long‑term value of the capital market and innovative pharmaceuticals. Furthermore, several international institutional investors also made their first entry into the Hong Kong capital market through this offering, further enhancing Hong Kong's position on the global capital map for healthcare and technology.

Racing Towards AI-first Innovation: From GANs Pioneer to Pharmaceutical Superintelligence

Insilico is at the forefront of generative AI application in life science research, aiming to tackle key scientific and technological challenges in life sciences from first principles using cutting‑edge generative AI. Since its inception, Insilico Medicine is committed to transparency and reproducibility, publishing hundreds of academic papers and presenting at frontier academic and industry conferences. 

In 2016, Insilico published a Nature Communications paper, proposing a novel computational method, iPANDA, to address core challenges in biomarker discovery and target-disease associations in omics data analysis. This pathway-based method has since evolved into multiple deep-learning generative algorithms behind Insilico's AI‑powered biological research powering the PandaOmics platform. 

In 2019, Insilico's publication in Nature Biotechnology described how its proprietary deep generative model, GENTRL, was used to discover a potent inhibitor of the kinase target DDR1. It took only 21 days from target identification to the generation of a molecule with drug‑like properties. This study is regarded as one of the landmark events in the rise of AI‑driven drug discovery and laid an important academic foundation for the widespread adoption of generative AI in drug discovery and development.

These two early academic papers, along with a series of other published fundamental research, laid a solid foundation for Insilico to build Pharma.AI, its integrated end‑to‑end platform spanning biology, generative chemistry, clinical development and scientific research. 

In 2025 alone, Insilico Medicine scientists published 9 papers in Nature-family journals and 10 papers in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 

Since 2020, the Pharma.AI platform has been launched and commercialized as a modular software suite, and its collaboration network has expanded globally. As of the latest practicable date, Insilico has entered into software licensing collaborations with 13 of the world's top 20 largest pharmaceutical companies. 

By continuously iterating its algorithms, building proprietary multimodal data warehouses, and improving infrastructure and tooling, Insilico has consistently optimized the performance of the Pharma.AI platform and extended its capabilities into emerging areas such as sustainable chemistry and agriculture, driving deep integration of AI‑driven innovation across the entire life science value chain.

In December 2022, Life Star 1, the industry's first fully automated biology laboratory independently constructed by Insilico, was officially put into operation. Highly integrated with Insilico's AI platform, the lab closes the loop from in silico design to experimental validation, enabling a highly efficient "lights‑out factory" capable of unmanned operation. While supporting wet‑lab validation for both internal and partnered projects, it continuously accumulates high‑quality proprietary datasets to further power the evolution of the AI platform. In September 2025, the upgraded Life Star 2 was officially launched with significantly enhanced cross‑island equipment coordination and multi‑workflow parallel processing capabilities, establishing a more convenient, stable and highly scalable intelligent lab system through refined allocation algorithms and response mechanisms.

In 2025, Insilico first proposed the concept of Pharmaceutical Superintelligence, defining it as the next stage of AI‑driven drug R&D, which aims at a fully AI‑driven, autonomous, and intelligent system for drug discovery and development. Insilico's experimentally-validated purpose-built models can now be used to make other frontier multimodal models including third-party models more intelligent and capable in multiple scientific discovery tasks. 

Global Leading AI R&D Capabilities: From First AIDD Milestone to Global Benchmarks

By integrating its proprietary AI‑enabled drug discovery platform with advanced automated laboratory capabilities, Insilico has significantly improved the efficiency of drug R&D in practice. It has not only delivered pioneering innovation milestones, but also established a benchmark for AI‑driven drug discovery. Compared with the average of 4.5 years typically required for traditional early‑stage drug R&D, Insilico reduced the average time from program initiation to preclinical candidate (PCC) nomination to 12–18 months across more than 20 in‑house programs between 2021 and 2024, with only 60–200 molecules synthesized and tested per program.

The most representative example is Rentosertib (ISM001‑055), a novel mechanism‑of‑action candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) empowered by AI. This program is considered the most advanced first‑in‑class AI‑discovered drug currently in development. Insilico completed the early discovery phase in just 18 months and identified the PCC after screening and testing only 78 molecules. The AI‑driven R&D journey of this program, from target discovery and molecule design through to Phase I clinical studies, was published in Nature Biotechnology in March 2024, providing the first systematic demonstration of an AI‑enabled, end‑to‑end drug discovery process from scratch.

Also in 2024, Insilico completed the China Phase IIa clinical trial for Rentosertib, with favorable safety and tolerability demonstrated, as well as an emerging dose‑dependent efficacy trend in IPF patients, indicating the potential to reverse the disease progression. The results were published in Nature Medicine in May 2025 and are regarded as the first clinical proof‑of‑concept milestone in the AI drug discovery field, providing valid practical evidence for AI‑driven drug discovery.

In addition, Insilico continues to extend its specialized AI‑driven capabilities into more areas of high unmet medical needs, building a structured portfolio of more than 30 programs centered around key therapeutic areas including fibrosis, oncology, immunology, inflammation, cardiometabolics and central nervous system (CNS) disease. Among all the innovative pipelines, 10 have received IND clearance, 7 of them are currently in active clinical development.

Meanwhile, AI‑driven R&D collaborations and pipeline out‑licensing are expanding. As of the latest practicable date, Insilico has achieved 3 out‑licensing deals with global pharmaceutical companies including Exelixis and Menarini, with the maximum total deal value up to$2.1 billion. Furthermore, co‑development partnerships with global pharma leaders including Fosun Pharma, Sanofi and Lilly provide solid validation and powerful boost for the value of AI applications in the global drug discovery industry.

AI&DD Dual‑engine Drive: Global Appearance Attract Long‑term Support for Industry Paradigm Shift

Since its founding in the United States in 2014, Insilico Medicine has expanded its business to four continents with the pioneering AI&DD dual‑engine management model, driving an in-depth combination of AI algorithm innovation and drug development expertise to achieve efficient and balanced growth. As of the latest practicable date, under the leadership of its two Co‑CEOs, Insilico boasts an R&D team of 249 experienced scientists, with master and doctorate degree holders accounting for 87% of this highly international team.

Under this dual‑engine management framework, the two core leaders bring their unique strengths to work in close synergy. Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Business Officer of Insilico, focuses on the application of cutting‑edge AI technologies and is responsible for overall corporate strategy and AI innovation. Dr. Zhavoronkov is widely recognized for his academic influence and research productivity, being listed 3 times among the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers, with an H‑index of 72 assessed by Google Scholar. The drug discovery and development team is led by Feng Ren, PhD, Co-CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of Insilico Medicine, an experienced drug hunter, who is responsible for guiding R&D exploration directions and overseeing the execution of pipeline asset development. Dr. Ren has devoted nearly 20 years to innovative drug R&D and has authored more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals, and holds approximately 120 patents in total. 

Committed to open-source academic research and knowledge sharing, Insilico maintains active communication with the industry with continuous publication about technological breakthroughs and industrial milestones. The company authors more than 300 peer‑reviewed papers and holds over 700 patents or applications. Supported by its outstanding contribution, Insilico was recognized in the Nature Index 2024 list of the world's top 100 global corporate institutions for biological sciences and natural sciences publications. In 2025, one of Insilico's studies was selected among the top 10 advances by Nature Biotechnology, and featured on the journal's December cover.

Following the IPO, Insilico plans to allocate approximately 48% of the net proceeds to fund further clinical research and development of our key clinical stage pipeline drug candidates, 20% to fund the research and development, for early-stage drug discovery and development, 15% for development of new generative AI models and the associated validation research work, 12% for the further development and expansion of our automated lab, and 5% for working capital and other general corporate purposes. While consolidating the strengths of its "AIDD dual‑engine" model, the company will continue to integrate global resources and seek collaboration opportunities to accelerate the fundamental paradigm shift across the biopharmaceutical industry.

About Insilico Medicine

Insilico Medicine is a pioneering global biotechnology company dedicated to integrating artificial intelligence and automation technologies to accelerate drug discovery, drive innovation in the life sciences, and extend healthy longevity to people on the planet. The company was listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on December 30, 2025, under the stock code 03696.HK.

By integrating AI and automation technologies and deep in-house drug discovery capabilities, Insilico is delivering innovative drug solutions for unmet needs including fibrosis, oncology, immunology, pain, and obesity and metabolic disorders. Additionally, Insilico extends the reach of Pharma.AI across diverse industries, such as advanced materials, agriculture, nutritional products and veterinary medicine. For more information, please visit www.insilico.com

 

source: Insilico Medicine