Lunan Pharmaceutical embraces AI across the full chain
Lunan Pharmaceutical Group, a 58-year-old drugmaker based in Linyi, East China's Shandong province, has built artificial intelligence into its research, production and management, using a self-developed large language model platform to accelerate its goal of reaching 100 billion yuan ($14.08 billion) in output value.
The company's "Lunan Zhiqing" platform now hosts more than 100 AI agents covering more than 200 application scenarios. Having set an "AI plus pharmaceuticals" direction in 2024, the group made AI a task for all employees in 2026.
Zhang Guimin, the group's chairman and general manager, said AI will determine the ceiling of the pharmaceutical industry. In recruitment, a robot scans more than 2,000 university job sites, and the company's "smart HR" system screens 12,000 résumés down to 100 candidates within minutes. A digital human runs 24-hour livestreams for product promotion.
On a fully self-hosted computing foundation, and drawing on more than 30 years of data accumulation and about a decade of application data, the company has built an AI drug discovery platform. The candidate discovery cycle has been cut from 36 months to under 20 months and R&D costs reduced by more than 40 percent, with only about 100 molecules now entering synthesis instead of 200.
In production, automated guided vehicles and robotic arms move 11 tons of materials a day, equivalent to the workload of 13 workers, while fault resolution time has fallen 40 percent. Customer service response times have dropped from three minutes to 15 seconds, and pharmacovigilance reports that once took 12 hours are now completed in five minutes with accuracy above 98 percent.
The group holds 33 formulation approvals in China, the United States and the European Union, 76 approvals in emerging markets, eight CEP certificates, more than 40 drug master files in the EU, the United States and Japan, and more than 50 in other emerging markets, said Feng Zhong, assistant general manager.
Editor：韩蒙蒙