President Xi Jinping stressed that China must strengthen basic research and enhance its capacity for scientific and technological innovation to secure control over the development of its biopharmaceutical industry.

Last week, "China's Biomanufacturing Innovation DNA," a joint media report produced by television stations from five major cities—Shijiazhuang, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and Guangzhou—was officially launched. Against the backdrop of a decade of transformative growth in China's innovative drug sector, the report focuses on the innovation practices of the National Bio-industry Bases in these five cities, selecting representative case studies to decode the landscape of China's biomanufacturing innovation from multiple dimensions.

As a key case study, Westlake Pharma was featured in the report, illustrating the innovation practices within Hangzhou's biopharmaceutical industry.

In the segment, Hangzhou Television provided an in-depth and detailed presentation of the R&D process for Westlake Pharma’s first drug candidate, Mprosevir. Mprosevir features a novel, proprietary scaffold. The team advanced the candidate from initial discovery to the successful completion of clinical trials in approximately three years—a timeline significantly faster than traditional methods. The R&D team deeply integrates DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening with artificial intelligence to enhance efficiency.

During the R&D process, the team employed DEL screening technology to conduct an initial screen of tens of billions of compounds. Then by applying transfer learning and pre-trained models, the team enabled effective learning from small-sample data in drug development. This AI-driven approach successfully overcame the challenge of DEL screening results being plagued by false positives, allowing for the rapid identification of compounds with high druggability potential. This innovative technological pathway has significantly shortened the drug development cycle and effectively reduced R&D costs.

The story was also featured on Hangzhou News program, under the headline "Hangzhou Team Rewrites the '30-Year Rule' of Drug R&D with AI." The report highly commended Westlake Pharma’s R&D model and its achievements.

As the report highlights, Westlake Pharma’s innovative R&D model has genuinely broken through the efficiency bottlenecks of traditional drug development. The company has systematically distilled the essence of this model into its proprietary AI drug discovery platform, WAND, which encompasses key stages such as target discovery, molecule generation, and molecule optimization. The WAND platform is now fully deployed across all of the company's R&D pipelines.

Looking ahead, Westlake Pharma will leverage its extensive experience in interdisciplinary research to continuously iterate its technology platform and remain dedicated to the R&D of innovative drugs. At the same time, Westlake Pharma looks forward to collaborating with industry partners to accelerate the high-quality development of China's biopharmaceutical industry.