| One place came up in conversation as often as Mar-a-Lago at this year's JPMorgan Healthcare Conference: China. There's been a flurry of deals between US-based and Chinese companies in the last few months. In November, BioNTech bought China-based Biotheus, maker of a promising new cancer drug. The same month Merck & Co. inked a deal to gain the rights to a competing cancer compound from LaNova Medicines. And in December, Merck snagged a potential obesity drug by China-based Hansoh Pharmaceutical Group. "There has been a significant and fundamental shift in the last five years in terms of the breadth, depth and quality of assets coming out of China," Gilead Sciences' Chief Financial Officer Andy Dickinson said during a roundtable with reporters. In the past, Chinese companies often worked on follow-on drugs similar to what was already on the market, but now Chinese biotech companies are producing highly competitive drug candidates in hot emerging areas of science. "What we are seeing today is fundamentally different — first in class, best in class," Dickinson said. At a reception outside the conference titled "East Meets West," organized by Yafo Capital, attendees acknowledged China's shortcomings in biotech but also discussed how the local industry has moved past them. "We're not so good at going from zero to one," said Victor Ye, managing partner at Yafo, a firm that brokers deals between Western drugmakers and their peers in China. "But we are very good at going from 1 to 100." In other words, China companies may not be the first to make a drug. But they are fast followers. Bob Duggan, co-CEO of Summit Therapeutics, likened the evolution of the Chinese drug industry to how children learn by first copying, then innovating. His company licensed a lung cancer drug from a Chinese drug company called Akeso. Last year that drug outperformed Keytruda, the world's best selling drug, in a clinical trial, generating awe in biotech circles. Summit's drug is in one of the hot new areas in cancer: antibodies known as bispecifics that hit multiple targets. Gilead Sciences doesn't yet have any compounds licensed from China but it is actively looking for them, as it's seen the quality of Chinese-designed drug candidates improve dramatically in the last few years, executives said at a briefing at the conference Wednesday. "We have seen kind of a resurgence in the past five years or so" in the level of early-stage innovation scientists there are producing, said Daniel O'Day, Gilead's CEO. China also seems to have the ability to do early-stage trials very quickly, which gives them an additional advantage as they get a fast readout on a therapy's promise. Yet Chinese clinical trials of experimental drugs still face some skepticism as to whether they will be reproducible in the West. "A big question that hasn't been answered is how believable is their data," said Regeneron Pharmaceuticals' CEO Leonard Schleifer. While the US Food and Drug Administration is pretty good at making sure data quality is high, he said "it's not clear that that is the case in China now." — Robert Langreth and Gerry Smith LIVE FROM DAVOS: Get the Economics Daily newsletter for full on-the-ground coverage of the World Economic Forum. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment