With the ASCO meeting just around the corner, I took a look at some interesting and innovative oncology companies in China.
Two key Chinese government initiatives, both launched in 2016, have been key milestones in advancing the oncology treatment landscape and growth opportunities for advanced oncology therapeutics.
The Precision Medicine Initiative was announced created as part of a plan to pump ~$9 billion for research of human genetics and biology (40x the size of a similar initiative in the United States). Today, Shenzhen’s Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is already the world’s largest sequencer and repository of genetic material in cancer and beyond.
Complementing the precision medicine investments, Healthy China 2030 covers five focus areas to ensure improved health: public health services, environment management, the medical industry, and food and drug safety. Goals for this include increasing Chinese citizens’ average life expectancy from 77.3 to 79 years by 2030. Infant mortality decreased from to 9.5 deaths per 1000 live births in 2020 and 6.0 deaths per 1000 live births in 2030. (Source)
Here are my top emerging picks for China:
Ranok Therapeutics – Hangzhou, China and Waltham, MA – is a privately held
pre-clinical stage biopharmaceutical company that is pioneering an innovative targeted protein degradation technology for the discovery and development of novel therapeutics.
Chemically induced, targeted protein degradation (TPD) has recently emerged as an exciting new modality for small molecule drug development. Ranok has developed an innovative, next-generation TPD technology that engages different underlying biological processes and has unique advantages over competing TPD approaches. Ranok’s pipeline includes both well-validated and novel drug targets that are implicated in cancer and other diseases with significant unmet medical needs.
ImmVira Therapeutics, Shenzhen, is a biotechnology company focused on genetically modified oncolytic viruses as potential cancer therapeutics. The company has developed science, technology and know-how to support ongoing research, development and commercialization of oncolytic viruses on the OvPENS (OV+ Potent, Enabling, Novel & Safe) platform. The OvPENS platform comprises of research, patents, gene-recombinant know-how, manufacturing technology and commercialization analytics to develop next-generation oncolytic viruses that reach drug development targets and that are potent, enabling, novel and safe.
Abbisko Therapeutics, Shanghai, was founded in 2016 to address the #1 cause of death in China, cancer. They have strategically designed and developed a rich pipeline of 10+ small molecule programs focused on oncology. They have developed a strong pipeline of candidates in both precision oncology and immuno-oncology.
InnoCare Pharmaceuticals, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, New Jersey and Boston, are committed to discovering, developing and commercializing best-in-class and/or first-in-class drugs for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases. Led by a world-class management team of seasoned industry executives, we have built a fully integrated biopharmaceutical platform with strong in-house R&D capabilities, including drug target identification and verification, preclinical evaluation, clinical trial design and execution, drug manufacturing and quality control, and commercialization.
They currently have robust pipelines in liquid cancer, solid tumors and autoimmune diseases.
Hrain Biotechnology, Shanghai, is driven by the goal of relieving patients from diseases, focusing on R&D and application of tumor immunotherapy technologies and the transformation of the latest foreign tumor immunotherapy technologies. They have always been an active promoter for innovative tumor immunotherapy technologies and a provider of advanced precision treatment solutions for cancer patients.
Hrain develops CAR-T technology as the center while CAR-NK, TCR-T and other technologies are being promoted in parallel. They have several CAR-T clinical trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, an authoritative platform for exchanges of clinical experience in America, and we also have multiple clinical centers located in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc.
Elpiscience, Shanghai and Germantown, MD, has a robust pipeline of globally innovative cancer immunotherapies, covering a wide range of oncology targets. Through internal R&D expertise and partnerships with global biopharmaceutical companies, Elpiscience endeavors to advance at least one innovative program into the clinic each year.
Elpiscience aims to transform cancer treatment by developing immunotherapies to turn “cold” tumors “hot.” They strive to find differentiated biology to enable effective crosstalk between innate immunity and adaptive immunity, harnessing the full potential of the immune system to fight cancer.