Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine, a global leading generative artificial intelligence (AI)-driven biotechnology company, has signed a Revolving Loan Facility of up to $100 million with HSBC, one of the world's largest banks and financial services institutions. 

The credit line, provided from HSBC New Economy Fund, will support the expansion of Insilico's proprietary novel drug discovery pipeline and the upgrade of its end-to-end diversified artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Pharma.AI.

According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the innovative drug market is expected to reach $526 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 3.4%. Today, a novel drug is still expected to cost 10 years and $1 billion, calling for ground-breaking technologies including artificial intelligence to break through the bottlenecks. The biopharma industry is in even more urgent need for real-life cases and proof of concepts to stay confident.

In 2016, Insilico first described the concept of using generative AI for the design of novel molecules in a peer-reviewed journal, which laid the foundation for the commercially available Pharma.AI platform. In 2019. Insilico Medicine established office in Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (HKSTP), building target discovery and platform application teams to empower research collaborations with top research institutes including the University of Cambridge, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Zurich, and the University of Toronto.

In early 2024, Insilico published a Nature Biotechnology paper presenting the entire R&D journey from AI algorithms to Phase II clinical trials of ISM001_055, the company’s lead drug pipeline with AI-discovered target and AI-designed structure. Following that, Insilico has recently announced positive preliminary results from a Phase IIa trial (NCT05938920), where ISM001_055 showed favorable safety and tolerability across all dose levels, as well as dose-dependent response in forced vital capacity (FVC), after only 12 weeks of dosage.