Beijing-based biotech unicorn METiS TechBio announced the launch of NanoForge, which the company describes as the world's first AI-powered nano delivery platform. The breakthrough technology could fundamentally reshape how medicines are designed and delivered, potentially enabling the development of reprogrammable drugs.
Company co-founder and CEO Chris Lai positioned the technology as a transformative solution to one of medicine's most persistent challenges. "NanoForge is like the SpaceX of drug delivery. It is both the rocket that delivers drugs precisely and the satellite that speeds up new drug development," Lai said at the launch event in Beijing. "This could solve one of the toughest problems in medicine, which is to get treatments exactly where they need to go, without harming healthy tissue."
Addressing a Critical Industry Challenge
Drug delivery has remained one of the pharmaceutical industry's most significant obstacles. While anti-cancer drugs should theoretically target only tumor cells and gene therapies should focus on damaged organs, medicines frequently become misdirected, intercepted by the immune system, or affect healthy tissues. This leads to reduced therapeutic effectiveness and unwanted side effects.
The success of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in 2020 demonstrated the potential of lipid nanoparticle systems as delivery vehicles. However, making these systems work effectively across multiple organs and scaling them for broader drug innovation has remained what the industry considers an unsolved challenge.
Five Years of Development
METiS developed NanoForge over five years, creating a platform that combines advanced AI models with both computer simulations and laboratory experiments. The system integrates the company's proprietary lipid design algorithms with one of the world's largest lipid nanoparticle libraries, enabling a complete end-to-end process from designing new molecules to testing and refining them in a closed-loop system.
The platform has yielded three core solutions: AiLNP for nucleic acid delivery, AiRNA for mRNA sequence design, and AiTEM for small-molecule drug formulation.
Impressive Scale and Performance
NanoForge has generated more than 10 million lipid structures and collected approximately 100,000 data points to train its AI models. The platform has successfully demonstrated targeted delivery capabilities across eight types of human organs and tissues, including the liver, lungs, heart, muscles, tumors, the central nervous system, and the gastrointestinal tract.
To protect its technological advantage, METiS has filed or secured over 100 patents related to the platform.
Robust Clinical Pipeline
The company's drug pipeline now encompasses more than 10 advanced programs. Seven candidates have been validated in preclinical studies, while four have progressed to clinical trials. The most advanced candidate, an oncology therapy, has reached the pre-NDA stage—the final step before filing for regulatory approval.
"We've shown that combining large-scale AI with both lab experiments and simulations can dramatically boost R&D efficiency," Lai explained. "With NanoForge, our goal is to fuel the next wave of drug innovation in China."
