On October 18, 10 biopharceutical companies conducted roadshows at the Financing and Investment Sub-Forum on the second day of the fourth International Symposium on the Frontiers and Practice of Innovative Drug R&D.

 

 

The guests reviewing the roadshows were Zhen Wang, a partner of MingFeng Capital, and Xiao Ma, a partner of Boyi Investment Fund. Zhen Wang told www.p5w.net that China has two major advantages when it comes to the development of the biopharmaceutical industry. One is that China has a large number of scientists, and the other is that it has the world's second largest equity investment fund.        

Both investors said that the roadshow session hosted for the first time by the symposium, which came to its fourth edition this year, brought together the most promising projects in China. Among them, GemPharmatech and Crystal Pharmatech are leaders in the industry segments with an upcoming IPO respectively. Xiao Ma pointed out that by establishing a subsidiary in Chengdu, GemPharmatech is expected to drive the development of innovative drugs in China, while Crystal Pharmatech has achieved fission-like development by continuing to invest in other projects and become an IP and product-based company from a pure technical service company.

Ablink Biotech Co., Ltd. based in Chendu is committed to the discovery of new biopharmaceuticals based on its self-developed antibody, peptide, TCR and CAR-T libraries with a diversity on the scale of hundreds of billions.

At the roadshow, Jianghai Liu of Ablink Biotech said that the company builds an antibody library which is aimed to further expand and diversify: “We provide CRO services, antibody screening, antibody optimization, etc. for many companies. The main purpose of the CRO part is to feed our team. At present, we have 20 people on the team, and we want to maintain 30 people in the future, which is possible with orders from just 5 big companies a year. The second thing we want to do is transfer the rights in the many candidates we have, including antibodies and CAR-T, and also Her3 antibodies, with very good varieties, which are currently still in the pre-clinical stage, hopefully after validation on animals. By doing this, we as a small company can stand better positioned and more focused.”

According to Chao Qiu for the roadshow of Shanghai Jinwei Biotechnology Co., Ltd., the company mainly develops products based on lentiviral vectors, and has developed several pipelines suitable for the disease burden in China: one is personalized neoantigen therapy mainly for malignant tumors. There is also the filing for approval of biopharmaceuticals for infectious diseases and major infectious diseases. One of them is a therapy for chronic hepatitis B, of which the efficacy study has been completed by the company and its French partner. After the completion of the production plant, the company will file an IND application, and expects to submit the project in the second quarter of next year.

Weihong Peng for the roadshow of Jiangsu Jingze Biotech Co., Ltd., is a long-term successful entrepreneur in the field of medicine. He led his team to successfully develop natriuretic peptides and other products, and won the first prize of Sichuan Science and Technology Progress Award. He said that the company is now mainly involved in ophthalmology, assisted reproduction and oncology and hopes to be a leader in the fields of ophthalmology and reproduction in China, and to develop some innovative products for oncology. Their current main technology platforms are recombinant therapeutic protein and recombinant antibody drug platforms, and they are preparing to launch the cell therapy platform. There are nearly ten varieties in research and development, three of which have entered the clinical research stage.

Reistone Biopharma Company Limited is a clinical stage startup founded in January 2018. Xiaodong Wu during the roadshow said the company’s current mission is to quickly establish its product line and push the assets in the pipeline to the clinical stage and market. The company focuses on autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, a field with quite great market prospects in China.

Fujian Jiyuan Biotech Co., Ltd. is a high-tech company that develops cell therapy drugs for tumors, specializing in the development of the world's leading next-generation artificial chemokine (ACGT) for the biological immunotherapy for solid tumors.

Yuan Lin said during the company’s roadshow: “We have launched the world's first artificial chemokine drug. For the time being, we are the only benchmarking project in the United States, and we have no competitors in China. We have more advanced technologies as our team in China comes from the benchmarking project team.”

Yanzhi Liu, the presenter for the roadshow of Bohe Biotechnology (Chengdu) Co., Ltd., said that the company focuses on innovative bone-targeted drug delivery for orthopedic diseases and control reagents, and to solve difficulties in orthopedics. The project started in 2016, and then took some time to improve the data link, so it now has a relatively mature process system. The company is going to do some trails for validation to bring this drug to the market as soon as possible.

Founded in January 2019, Chengdu Renyu Biotechnology Co., Ltd. is a new drug R&D service provider focusing on upstream discovery of antibody molecules. At present, the company can provide customers with antibody customization, library products, antibody engineering and other services.

According to the company’s roadshow presenter Jinhua Feng, the company has currently developed two products: a natural camel VHH library and a natural human scFv antibody library. It plans to establish an efficient antibody discovery technology platform, continue to expand and diversify the portfolio, and build a complete antibody activity evaluation system.

Shanghai Innogen Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd. focuses on the development of innovative drugs for diabetes and metabolic diseases. At present, its core product Supalutide (a long-acting human-derived GLP-1 drug) has entered a phase II clinical trial.

Qinghua Wang, the company's roadshow presenter, said that these projects are proprietary intellectual property and have obtained patents for chemical structures. The company has a production platform for recombinant proteins and a series of short-term products for diabetes and metabolic diseases.

Sichuan Ankekang Biopharmaceutical Co., Ltd. is committed to developing a new generation of oncolytic virus immunotherapy drugs for tumors and novel therapeutic vaccines. Li Yu, the company's roadshow presenter, said:"We are a startup R&D company integrating genetic viruses or immunotherapy. We offer new drugs with proprietary intellectual property rights. Our products are the first of their kind from design to the processes in China and even in the world. Our virus vectors are yellow fever viruses, which mainly infect epithelial cells, so it has a broad-spectrum effect."

Zhijian Xi, the roadshow presenter of Zhejiang Palo Alto Pharmaceuticals Co., Ltd., said that the company is a new drug development company that mainly develops drugs for the treatment of hepatitis B, which is a major disease in China. In the near future, the disease may be eliminated by humans. The company specializes in solutions for hepatitis B, and has established the best hepatitis B R&D platform in the world.

"When the company was established in 2014, the valuation was about RMB 100 million, and the current valuation is about RMB 1 billion. We hope to have two drugs that will enter the phase II clinical trial in about two years, and make breakthroughs in the therapies for several major diseases," said Zhijian Xi .

According to Wenlin Ren, the roadshow presenter of Beijing AbMax Biotechnology Co., Ltd., the company specializes in the development of antibody drugs. It uses its proprietary Fc receptor-dependent function platform to transform and optimize the heavily researched original drugs that are already on the market, completely solving the problems of antibody drugs' effectiveness and safety, so that the products can go to the market faster with less investment and lower risks.

The International Symposium on the Frontiers and Practice of Innovative Drug R&D has been successfully held in Chengdu for three consecutive years since its first edition in 2016. The symposium aims to build an international biopharmaceutical ecosystem, a platform for sharing forward-looking information and cutting-edge technologies regarding innovative drug development and practice, and become a business platform that integrates innovative resources and promotes cross-border cooperation.

This year’s symposium came with a new Financing and Investment Sub-Forum, and hosted roadshows for a total of 17 biopharmaceuticals projects at home and abroad in two days. The sub-forum was held under the direction of the Chengdu Talent Development Leading Group and the Chengdu High-tech Industrial Development Zone’s Finance Bureau, and co-organized by HitGen and CICC. www.p5w.net was the exclusive platform for the roadshows and provided investors all over the country with online and offline live broadcasting of presentations and video roadshows and related reports.