PIOLET BIOTECHNOLOGY: Closes RMB 10 Million-Plus Seed Round Led by Trinity Capital, Taking Antivirulins Into Drug-Resistant Infections

NewTimeSpace News: On 11 November 2026, Chengdu Piolet Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (Piolet Biotechnology, unlisted) announced the closing of a seed round described as above RMB 10 million, led by Xi'an Trinity Capital with Wuhan Juhua Chuanxin participating. The exact amount and post-money valuation were not disclosed. All proceeds will go to the company's core pipeline, namely full-chain preclinical research on antivirulins targeting key clinical pathogens, and to team expansion; the company says it will advance preclinical work and an IND filing.

Piolet was founded in November 2024 and had not previously disclosed any equity financing. It was co-founded by Dr Zhao Kelei and Dr Zhou Xikun. Zhao comes from the Sichuan Industrial Institute of Antibiotics and heads the Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory of Antibiotic Creation and Drug-Resistance Prevention and Control; Zhou comes from the State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy at Sichuan University and West China Hospital and is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. Core staff come from those institutions and from leading pharmaceutical companies.

The company sums up its approach as anti-virulence, re-sensitisation and resistance avoidance. Its molecules target quorum sensing, the intercellular communication and virulence-control hub of bacteria, blocking core regulatory proteins through competitive binding and simultaneously suppressing toxin secretion, bacterial motility, drug efflux, biofilm formation and immune evasion, so that pathogens are rendered harmless and cleared by host immunity or combination therapy. The company says that because it does not directly kill bacteria the approach creates no survival selection pressure and may restore the sensitivity of some already resistant antibiotics to treatment. It has built a high-throughput in vitro and in vivo efficacy evaluation system, an integrated virtual screening platform called Dockey, a drug-resistant infection to nematode high-throughput screening platform and a mouse model of chronic respiratory infection.

Its pipeline covers core strains in the World Health Organization's 2024 priority pathogen list, spanning respiratory infections involving Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae, burn and skin infections involving Pseudomonas aeruginosa and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, tuberculosis, urinary tract infections, acne and oral inflammation. Globally no antivirulence drug has yet been approved; according to vbdata, only 4 of the world's top 20 pharmaceutical companies still maintain antibiotic research pipelines, and no small-molecule antibacterial with a genuinely new mechanism has reached the market in nearly 30 years.