Insilico Medicine: the company behind rentosertib
Who Insilico Medicine are, where they are based, who runs them, how they are funded and what else is in their pipeline.
Insilico Medicine is the biotechnology company that discovered and developed rentosertib. It was founded in 2014, is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 30 December 2025 under the ticker 3696. It has no UK office and has never registered a company in the UK.
Origins and where it is based
Alex Zhavoronkov founded Insilico Medicine in 2014 while he was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The headquarters moved from Baltimore to Hong Kong, and then in mid-2024 to Cambridge, Massachusetts. The listed entity is registered in the Cayman Islands as InSilico Medicine Cayman TopCo.
It has offices in Boston and Cambridge, New York, Montreal, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Suzhou, Yixing, Taipei and Hong Kong, and reports a headcount of roughly 300 to 335. A subsidiary set up in the Skolkovo technology park in Russia in 2016, which received a grant of about 90m roubles, was disposed of in full by October 2022.
Who runs it
| Role | Person | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Chairman and chief executive | Alex Zhavoronkov | Born in Riga, Latvia; Latvian and Canadian national. Queen’s University, MSc at Johns Hopkins, PhD at Moscow State. Also founded Deep Longevity. Holds about 7.6% of the company |
| Co-chief executive and chief scientific officer | Feng Ren | Harvard PhD, 11 years at GSK. First author of the 2024 Nature Biotechnology paper. The name “rentosertib” derives from his surname |
| President | Alex Aliper | Co-founder |
| Head of AI platforms | Petrina Kamya | Leads the Pharma.AI software |
| Senior vice-president, clinical development | Carol Satler MD PhD | The company’s main spokesperson on rentosertib |
Current holders of the chief medical officer and chief financial officer roles could not be verified.
The Pharma.AI platform
Insilico sells and uses a suite of software it calls Pharma.AI, marketed under the slogan “pharmaceutical superintelligence”. Biology42, including the tool PandaOmics, ranks possible drug targets by analysing genetic and protein data alongside text from patents, publications, grants and trial registries. Chemistry42 uses generative models to design molecules to fit a chosen target. Medicine42, including a tool called inClinico, is intended to predict trial outcomes, and Science42 handles literature work. Insilico licenses this software to other pharmaceutical companies as well as using it on its own programmes, and licensing is a significant part of its revenue. Rentosertib is the company’s showcase example: it says PandaOmics selected TNIK as the target in 2019 and Chemistry42 designed the molecule in 2020.
Laboratories
Insilico runs a robotics laboratory called Life Star, which uses automated equipment to run biological experiments. It is in the BioBAY park in Suzhou, China. Several press accounts have placed this laboratory in Hong Kong; that is wrong. A second facility, Life Star 2, opened in September 2025.
How it has been funded
| Round | Date | Amount raised |
|---|---|---|
| Series A | 2017 | US$8.26m |
| Series B | 2019 | US$37m |
| Series C | June 2021 | US$255m, led by Warburg Pincus |
| Series D | 2022 | US$95m, including Prosperity7 (Aramco) |
| Series E | 2025 | US$123m at a valuation of about US$1bn |
| Hong Kong listing | 30 December 2025 | HK$2.277bn, about US$293m |
The listing was the largest Hong Kong biotech flotation of 2025. Shares were priced at HK$24.05, the retail tranche was oversubscribed about 1,427 times, and the stock closed its first day about 45% above the offer price. Cornerstone investors included Eli Lilly, Tencent, Temasek, Schroders, UBS Asset Management, Oaktree and RTW. Three earlier listing applications, filed between 2023 and 2025, lapsed.
Financial results
| US$m | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | H1 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 30.1 | 51.2 | 85.8 | 56.2 | 106.3 |
| Net profit or loss | −221.8 | −211.6 | −17.1 | −352.3 | +35.5 |
The 2025 loss includes a one-off non-cash charge of about US$296.7m linked to the flotation. The first half of 2026 was the company’s first profitable half-year, on revenue up 287% year on year. Cash stood at about US$584.8m at 30 June 2026.
The pipeline
Insilico reports more than 40 programmes. It has nominated 31 preclinical candidates, obtained 13 investigational new drug clearances from regulators, and has eight medicines in Phase 1, three in Phase 2 and one, rentosertib, in Phase 3. Other named programmes include ISM6331 (a pan-TEAD inhibitor given FDA Fast Track designation in July 2026), ISM3412, ISM5939, garutadustat, ISM8207 and ISM8969.
Partnerships and deals
The figures below are headline values including future milestone payments, most of which are never paid.
| Date | Partner | Upfront | Potential total |
|---|---|---|---|
| November 2022 | Sanofi | Up to US$21.5m | Up to US$1.2bn |
| September 2023 | Exelixis (ISM3091) | US$80m | Not disclosed |
| January 2025 | Menarini (KIF18A) | US$20m | Over US$550m |
| January 2026 | Servier | US$32m | US$888m |
| March 2026 | Eli Lilly | US$115m | About US$2.75bn |
| July 2026 | Takeda | About US$60m | About US$600m |
None of these deals involve rentosertib. Insilico owns rentosertib outright, has never out-licensed it and is funding the Phase 3 trial itself from deal revenue. Harvard Business School teaches a case study, “Insilico’s Rentosertib Dilemma: A Star in the Pipeline?”, built around that decision.
Recognition
Insilico has been nominated twice for a Prix Galien USA “Best Start-Up” award, in 2025 and 2026, and was named the most innovative biotechnology company by Fast Company in 2024 and third in the same category in 2026. It appeared on Fortune’s 50 AI Innovators list in 2024 and the CB Insights AI 100, and was BioCentury-BayHelix Company of the Year in 2022. In 2026 its shares joined the HKEX Tech 100 and MSCI Global Small Cap indices. Awards of this kind come from trade publications and industry bodies and are not assessments of whether a medicine works.
Its UK footprint
Insilico’s presence in the UK is thin. A search of Companies House on 14 September 2026 found no Insilico entity, current or dissolved. There is no UK office, no UK laboratory and no UK trial site, and the company has never held a clinical trial authorisation from the MHRA.
The documented UK links are mostly academic and historical: a 2019 collaboration with the ARK ageing research group at King’s College London, involvement with an Oxford Big Data Institute doctoral training centre the same year, and work with Professor João Pedro de Magalhães, then at Liverpool. The one recent commercial link is Qureight, a Cambridge imaging analytics company, which published an analysis of the Phase 2a scan data in July 2025. There is no evidence it is involved in the Phase 3 trial.
Sources
- Ren F et al. A small-molecule TNIK inhibitor targets fibrosis in preclinical and clinical models. Nature Biotechnology 2024
- Xu Z et al. A generative AI-discovered TNIK inhibitor for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis: a randomized phase 2a trial. Nature Medicine 2025;31:2602–2610
- Insilico Medicine annual report 2025, filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
- Insilico Medicine corporate site and pipeline (company material)
- Pharmaphorum. Insilico ends 2025 with US$293m Hong Kong IPO
- Reuters. Eli Lilly signs deal worth up to about US$2.75bn with Insilico Medicine, 29 March 2026
- MIT Technology Review. When AI designs a drug, who gets the credit? 21 August 2026
- MIT Technology Review. An AI-driven 'factory of drugs' claims to have hit a big milestone, 20 March 2024
- Boston Globe and GEN reporting on the move of headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2024
- Insilico Medicine doses first patient in GENESIS-IPF-3 (company press release), 10 September 2026
- Harvard Business School case: Insilico's Rentosertib Dilemma: A Star in the Pipeline?
- Companies House search for Insilico entities (no UK company found, checked 14 September 2026)