Baidu-backed drug discovery start-up Biomap challenges Google’s AlphaFold

Biomap, a biotechnology start-up co-established by Baidu founder Robin Li Yanhong and backed by the Hong Kong government, says it has surpassed Alphabet subsidiary AlphaFold in commercialising artificial intelligence foundation models for drug discovery.

Multinational pharmaceutical companies were seeing a “reverse” in the technological gap between Biomap and AlphaFold, Wei Liu, co-founder and CEO of Biomap and former CEO of Baidu Ventures, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

“There’s no absolute winner in AI benchmark tests, but in terms of commercialisation and projects developed based on our models, I think we are ahead of AlphaFold,” said Wei. However, AlphaFold had “greater academic influence”, he added.

Developed by London-based DeepMind – owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet – AlphaFold is widely considered the global leader in using AI to analyse and predict molecular structures and interactions to discover new therapies.

Biomap reported last year that its xTrimo models demonstrated greater accuracy than AlphaFold 3 in determining interactions between 70 antibodies and 44 single-domain antibodies with their targets.