See new posts Conversation Byron Wan @Byron_Wan 🚨 Another Sputnik moment in the horizon?

Western drugmakers are striking more deals in China to access “bio-better” treatments for diseases from obesity to cancer, taking advantage of the early data on offer from the country’s faster and more lightly regulated trials.

Large pharmaceutical groups including GSK, Merck and AstraZeneca have each signed $1B+ agreements in the past two years to buy the rights to develop and sell China’s drugs outside the country.

Investors including Forbion, Bain Life Sciences and General Atlantic have ploughed hundreds of millions of $$$ into new biotechs that will develop Chinese assets for western markets, hoping to be bought by major drugmakers.

A third of all the compounds that large pharmaceutical companies bought the rights to last year came from China, a dramatic jump from just 12% two years ago. “Shanghai has become the center for search and evaluation for all global pharma.”

The rapid rise has been fuelled partly by early data from a soaring number of trials, which do not have the same ethical oversight or tight regulations as they would have in the West.

Investment in China presents a possible challenge to US and European biotechs, which often seek to sell to big pharma groups. 🇨🇳 biotechs may be willing to sell rights to their drugs at lower valuations because funding has dried up in their home market. Their drugs are often called “biobetters” because they are designed to tackle known biological targets rather than starting with a new discovery about how a disease works. These “super me-too” drugs are then engineered to work better than currently available ones.

Western companies are licensing 🇨🇳 drugs because rapidly conducted trials allowed data to be assessed at an early stage to see if an asset was worth buying. “China has a huge competitive advantage over the US. You can start a trial in months and find out if something works, whereas here it can sometimes take years.”

📍 The biotech industry could be disrupted by China, as the semiconductor sector was.

📍 “If you start outsourcing innovation and science as a nation, you risk declining in those areas over the long-term.”

Chinese companies often have banks of scientists who work long hours to speed through initial studies in labs and then in animals.

🇳🇱 Forbion has led large funding rounds in companies such as Aiolos, an asthma drugmaker that was sold to GSK for up to $1.4B. Trials in China usually recruit patients faster than in the west because of the country’s large pool of people who have not yet taken drugs for their condition and who are keen to participate in trials partly because they get the drugs for free. “In China, there are so many regional hospitals, you can go and find the patient population and get the signal much quicker.”

GSK in late 2023 licensed an antibody drug conjugate, a type of targeted chemotherapy, from 🇨🇳 Hansoh Pharma in a deal worth up to $1.5B.

The most prominent deals, including GSK’s with Hansoh, are usually based on conventional trials overseen by China’s national regulator. But much of the rise in the number of trials comes from hospital-based studies known as “investigator-initiated trials”, or IITs. Such trials, which are less tightly regulated, have soared in number from about 2,500 in 2018 to >8,000 last year.

“Hospitals and research institutions in China are highly responsive to clinical research, and in some places it is relatively faster to obtain clinical data on human subjects due to more regulatory flexibility and less expensive to recruit subjects compared to conducting similar clinical research in US.”

🇨🇳 companies are secretive about what they’re working on.

Western companies must now focus on where they can compete: creating drugs for completely new biological targets.

https://ft.com/content/f76c2e6b-dcc4-4e2c-a007-b53330226a5f