ByteDance

News Summary:

On May 2, 2026, ByteDance's drug discovery unit, Anew Labs, presented its first AI-designed therapy at a major immunology conference in Boston, featuring a generative AI-designed small molecule targeting IL-17, a protein-protein interaction previously considered undruggable. The unit, also known as Anew Therapeutics or ByteDance AI Drug Discovery, additionally published AnewOmni, a generative framework trained on 5 million biomolecular complexes, which claims to be the first to design functional molecules across all scales. Anew Labs operates from Shanghai, Singapore, and San Jose, California, with 36 core members and a scientific advisory board including Liu Yongjun, former president of Innovent Biologics; Ji Ma, former principal scientist at Amgen; and Hua Zou, scientific director of protein chemistry at Takeda California. Previously, on May 1, China's micro-drama industry, projected to exceed 120 billion yuan ($16.5 billion) this year, saw over 50,000 AI-native titles hit ByteDance's Douyin platform in March 2026 alone, produced at one-tenth the cost of live-action content. This established the industry as the world's first mass commercial application of AI-generated video. Earlier, on April 30, ByteDance's advanced video generation model, Seedance 2.0, became available in Creatify's Asset Generator, offering native audio, multi-shot consistency, and cinematic camera control in a single pass.