By Da Cheung
METiS Therapeutics, a drug discovery and delivery biotech, has received the regulatory green light for its offshore listing, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a March 23 disclosure, and the company officially disclosed its IPO prospectus two days later. IPO Early News reported that the Beijing-based developer, also known as METiS TechBio confidential application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange earlier this year, backed by joint sponsors Jefferies, Deutsche Bank’s Hong Kong branch, and CLSA.
METiS’s impending IPO follows the successful Hong Kong listing of drug discovery companies Insilico Medicine (3696.HK) in December 2025 and XtalPi (2228.HK) in 2024. Several other AI-driven pharmaceutical companies are also reportedly seeking, or have confidentially filed for, public offerings in the city.
Founded in 2020 by a team of MIT-trained scientists, the biotech startup says it uses AI to engineer nanomaterials for targeted drug delivery. In July 2025, it closed a Series C funding round of 350 million yuan ($48.6 million), valuing the company at $1.05 billion. To date, METiS TechBio has raised over 2.5 billion yuan from prominent investors, including venture capital firms Sequoia China and 5Y Capital.
Speeding up the pipeline for rare diseases
Traditional drug discovery is notorious for its agonizingly slow pace, a process that can take 10 to 15 years and cost over a billion dollars. This challenge is especially severe for complex conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal, progressive neurodegenerative disease that causes nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to degenerate and die. Globally, very few drugs have been approved for ALS over the past two centuries.
In a recent interview with People’s Daily Health Client, Dr. Dongsheng Fan, a neurology professor at Peking University Third Hospital, noted that AI intervention is finally changing this paradigm. Fan pointed out that AI platforms can rapidly compute new targets or repurpose existing drugs, reducing development time significantly while addressing the complex variations of a disease among different patients.
METiS Therapeutics says its AI platform for optimizing drug formulations cut the preclinical trial development phase of its drug MTS-004 to less than three months — a stark contrast to the industry average of one to two years. The medicine recently became China’s first AI-formulated drug to complete Phase III clinical trials, achieving the milestone just 38 months after the project began.
MTS-004 is designed to treat pseudobulbar affect (PBA) — a secondary condition causing uncontrollable crying or laughing that commonly afflicts patients with ALS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. The company says the drug could fill a major void in the domestic market, where no specific PBA treatments are currently approved.
‘Rockets and satellites’: The next era of targeted delivery
While AI accelerates the formulation of novel drugs, the physical challenge of safely transporting them to the right cells in the human body is a separate, complex hurdle. The company states it has developed an AI-driven platform to safely ferry genetic material or active drugs directly into specific cells and boasts a library of over 10 million lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) — tiny fat bubbles.
Dr. Chris Lai, the company’s co-founder and CEO, explained the concept to People’s Daily Health Client using a space-age metaphor: the LNP delivery system acts as a “rocket” that navigates the drug — the “satellite” — directly to the diseased tissue.
“In the past, injected drugs would run through the entire body,” Lai said. “It was like having to circle the earth just to find the bad guys. Now, we can lock onto the chemical signals of the target and drop the payload precisely.”
This precision reduces the toxic side effects of systemic treatments and unlocks potential cures for hard-to-reach tumors. The company’s pipeline includes MTS-105, a treatment for advanced liver cancer that has received an “orphan drug” designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It represents a potential breakthrough as the world’s first mRNA-encoded therapy for solid tumors.
METiS is also leveraging its massive LNP library to pioneer “In Vivo CAR-T,” a revolutionary method that reprograms immune cells directly inside the body rather than in a lab. According to an industry analysis by SinoTalk, this “off-the-shelf” approach bypasses the weeks of laboratory manufacturing required for traditional cell therapies, potentially slashing costs and improving patient safety. The technology has sparked a global race to create the first in-body cell therapy — a breakthrough that would allow cancer to be treated with a simple injection rather than weeks of laboratory manufacturing. Multinational giants like AbbVie, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Gilead Sciences are investing heavily in the space and have committed billions to acquisitions and partnerships.
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