Shuimu Molecule

About Shuimu Molecule

Shuimu BioSciences, which operates under the brand Shuimu Molecule and the domain pharmolix.com, is a biotechnology firm positioning itself at the intersection of structural biology and artificial intelligence for drug discovery. The company was established in 2017 in Beijing, China, by co-founders Dr. Hongwei Wang and Allen Chunlong Guo. The founders share a long-standing friendship and an academic background rooted in Tsinghua University and later at the University of California, Berkeley. Allen Guo, the CEO, is a serial entrepreneur with extensive experience in the technology sector, having previously founded 2048 Capital. Dr. Hongwei Wang, who serves as the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, is a distinguished cryo-EM methodologist and the Dean of the Institute of Biomedicine at Tsinghua University.

The company's core business revolves around providing cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) services and leveraging AI to accelerate early-stage drug discovery for its partners, which include pharmaceutical companies and research institutions like Bayer, Amgen, and Harvard University. In 2019, Shuimu BioSciences partnered with Thermo Fisher to establish the first commercial cryo-EM facility in the Asia-Pacific region. This facility has since expanded to become the largest of its kind globally, equipped with multiple state-of-the-art 300kV cryo-EM instruments. This infrastructure enables the firm to provide high-resolution structural insights into biological molecules, such as proteins and protein-drug complexes, which are crucial for drug development.

Shuimu's primary offering is a drug discovery platform that combines its high-throughput cryo-EM capabilities with artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. This integration automates and speeds up the process of data collection and atomic model building, reducing a workflow that traditionally takes weeks down to just one or two days. The service is designed to tackle previously 'undruggable' targets by visualizing their atomic-resolution structures, thereby facilitating rational drug design. Under the Pharmolix brand, the company is developing multimodal AI foundation models for the biomedical industry, covering aspects from molecular design and target discovery to clinical trial design. The business model appears to be service-based, offering one-stop 'sequence to structure' solutions and privatization deployment options for clients requiring high data confidentiality. The company has received funding from notable investors, including ByteDance, Gaorong Capital, and Puhua Capital.