China’s Innovation Moment: Takeaways from the 12th China Healthcare Summit
On BioCentury’s latest podcast: Paradigm-shifting speed of development, landmark deals, homegrown talent and a surging Hong Kong market
China is setting a new bar for the speed of clinical development and redefining the time it takes an asset to get to the clinic. On a special edition of the BioCentury This Week podcast recorded on stage at the 12th BioCentury BayHelix China Healthcare Summit in Shanghai, BioCentury VP and Editor in Chief Simone Fishburn argued that China’s emerging new standard for swift entry to the clinic could upend the bottleneck of translational development and usher in a new paradigm that could have a “massive impact globally.”
Fishburn and colleagues Joshua Berlin and Jeff Cranmer were joined by a trio of cross-border KOLs — John Zhu, founder, chairman and CEO of antibody-drug conjugate company Duality Biotherapeutics Inc.; Matt Hewitt, VP and CTO of Charles River Laboratories International Inc.’s manufacturing business division; and Bing Wang, CFO of China biotech Akeso Inc. — to discuss the speed of generating first-in-human data, Innovent Biologics Inc.’s $1.2 billion deal with Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., an evolving biotech talent pool, and the state of the financial markets.
“For me, it really feels like 2025 is the year that biotech globally woke up to China,” Fishburn said.
The Innovent deal, said Berlin, is the latest example: “That news flow has become almost impossible to ignore. And I think even those who might have discounted what was happening in China even a year ago are now reassessing and trying to understand what’s happening out here and also whether there might be opportunities for them.”
“For me, it really feels like 2025 is the year that biotech globally woke up to China.”
Panelists at the conference returned again and again to the story of Esobiotec S.A., which has become a poster child in China as an example of a Western biotech that recognized the value of running a China investigator-initiated trial (IIT) to generate data in a small number of patients. Despite having raised relatively little venture money, Esobiotec quickly parlayed data for its in vivo BCMA CAR T into an acquisition by AstraZeneca plc for up to $1 billion.
The presence of the “very scrappy, very talented” Esobiotec CEO Jean-Pierre Latere on stage at the Summit, said Wang, was a “perfect example of the integration of China’s innovation on the global stage.”
Esobiotec’s AZ deal joins the Legend Biotech Corp. (NASDAQ:LEGN) CAR T partnership with Johnson & Johnson as one of what Fishburn called a “marker” along the path of China biotech’s evolution, one of a few seminal points where the trajectory changed. Others include the groundbreaking data from Akeso’s PD-1/VEGF bispecific, and Duality’s bold Hong Kong exchange IPO this year.
China biotech has matured over the past “seven or eight years,” said Hewitt, citing IIT design, regulatory reform, and talent returning to China.
“The framework here has been streamlined such that you can move assets through very efficiently,” he said. “And it has woken up, I think, other parts of the world.”
Zhu spoke of taking DualityBio public on one of the Hong Kong stock exchange’s worst days of the year, the imperative of building a globally facing biotech, and finding synergies in clinical development across East and West.
A wave of offerings in Hong Kong has followed DualityBio’s IPO in April. And while several panelists at the conference cited the potential for near-term volatility — comments, Fishburn said, that ranged from calling conditions “frothy” to a “bubble about to burst” — Wang spoke to the maturation of the Hong Kong exchange.
“Investors all around the world have no problem investing in the Hong Kong market. It’s a very robust market. It’s a very developed market,” the Akeso CFO said. “I think after New York, maybe after London, Hong Kong’s a very developed market that gives people a lot of confidence in the quality of the investors, the quality of the regulatory requirements to be listed, and then the quality of the companies here.”
Turning to talent, Hewitt said that returnees, who studied in the West and worked at MNCs, continue to be the “anchor” for China’s biotech sector. But, he and Fishburn noted, new generations are rising through the ranks that no longer feel the need to go to the U.S.
BioCentury returns to Asia early next year for the 5th East-West Summit, March 9-11 in Seoul. Register today as a delegate or apply to join the Presenting Company Class to take advantage of early bird rates.