The AI pharmaceutical boom is gradually receding, how to survive the winter under the challenges?

Recently, the AI pharmaceutical field, which was once popular with capital, was poured with cold water: on August 9, AbSci, which has been listed for only one year, announced layoffs due to livelihood considerations
.

According to media reports, the company's layoffs are about 20%.
The AI pharmaceutical boom is gradually receding According to the data, AbSci Company was officially listed on July 22, 2021, and its main business is to use synthetic biology and deep learning AI technology to identify, screen and expand the production of new drug candidates
.

On the first day of listing, AbSci shares were issued at $16, up as much as 35%, and the market value was approaching $
2 billion.

Subsequently, the company's stock price also rose all the way, reaching a high of $
31.
53 during the period.

It is reported that in the two years before the listing, AbSci Company has obtained several rounds of large financing, which shows the optimism of capital on
the company.

Now as soon as the news of the company's layoffs came out, the industry believed that the AI pharmaceutical boom was gradually receding
.

In fact, not only AI pharmaceutical companies lay off employees, Exscientia and Sumitomo Pharmaceutical's AI-designed compound DSP-1181 is the world's first candidate drug designed by AI to enter clinical trials, and in July this year, the drug was "abandoned" by pharmaceutical companies because it did not meet expectations, and also became the focus
of attention in the industry.

Ai pharmaceutical cold has also been conveyed to the secondary market, in which the stock price of AI pharmaceutical company Schrodinger once fell from a high of $117 to $20.
71, a high decline of 82.
29%; Relay Therapeutics also saw a high decline of more than 80 percent
.

AbSci, which decided to lay off employees, also fell 91%
from its post-listing highs to July this year.

From all indications, ai pharmaceuticals, which were once popular with capital, now seem to be in the cold, and the challenges they face are becoming more prominent
.

How AI pharmaceutical companies should survive the winter in the future is a big problem
.

How to survive the winter? In fact, the main reason why AI pharmaceuticals are favored by capital is that traditional new drug research and development has bottlenecks such as long research and development cycle, high cost, and low success rate, and AI pharmaceuticals are expected to crack these bottlenecks, so pharmaceutical companies have entered this track, and capital increase is to further help AI pharmaceutical research and development
boom.

Among them, in China, AI pharmaceutical research and development boom is also emerging, only in 2020, the domestic AI pharmaceutical industry financing has reached 2.
7 billion yuan, financing events 12.


In previous years, the amount of financing was even less than 1 billion yuan
.

In February 2020, Schrodinger was listed on the U.
S.
stock market, further igniting the AI pharmaceutical market
.

Then Relay also followed the listing, with a total of six AI drug R&D companies listed in 2020, and seven AI drug R&D companies newly listed
in 2021.

Among them, the high-market capitalization AbCellera once exceeded $
4.
2 billion.

According to the current business of ai pharmaceutical companies around the world, it basically covers all aspects of new drug research and development: target discovery, compound synthesis, compound screening, crystal form prediction, patient recruitment, optimized clinical trial design and drug redirection
.

The industry believes that AI pharmaceuticals have unique advantages, although it is worth looking forward to, but it only brings a possibility
of improving the probability of success.

According to statistics, at present, there has not been an AI pharmaceutical product successfully listed in the world, as of June 20, there are about 51 drug pipelines
in 26 companies around the world that have entered the clinical phase I with AI assistance.

The future success of these drugs is uncertain, and continued funding
will be needed in the future.

"For AI pharmaceutical companies, if the capital market is difficult to recover, some companies may need to consider not poetry and distance, but survival issues
.
"
The above-mentioned person said
.

Disclaimer: In no event shall the information or opinions expressed herein constitute investment advice
to any person.