How do "third-rate pharmaceutical companies" refine "first-class drugs"?
Wen | amino observation
In the world of innovative medicine, the most important thing is the story of subversion.
From Baekje Shenzhou to Hengrui Pharma, it became the first innovative medicine, and then to the strong rise of domestic CAR-T and ADC, subversion continued.
In the innovative medicine camp, a group of unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies have even begun to make medicines. This may be subversive.
For example, Bailey Tianheng, which was born at the end of last year, set the world’s largest BD for ADC with a total transaction volume of 83 US dollars. People are surprised that a small imitation pharmaceutical company in Sichuan can also make a unique pipeline in the world?
For another example, Xiangxue Pharmaceutical, which has been popular recently, and the TCR-T therapy TAEST16001 developed by its subsidiary Xiangxue Life Sciences have been included in the list of breakthrough therapeutic varieties, and it is expected to become the first TCR-T listed. Xiangxue Pharmaceutical has also transformed from an old Chinese patent medicine enterprise into a leading company of advanced cell therapy, but the skyrocketing under the hype has come and gone quickly.
There are many incredible people, ideas and technologies in the field of innovative drugs, as well as a lot of hype. Therefore, the sense of separation and subversion is also increasing day by day.
However, the hype belongs to the hype, and the industry belongs to the industry. How is Xiangxue Pharmaceutical made? Behind this, how should we treat "innovation"?
01 innovative drugs are the most subversive.
When innovation becomes the main theme of the industry, transformation has become a top priority for all traditional pharmaceutical companies.
However, the opposition between tradition and innovation, and the gap between imitation and originality, most people think that traditional pharmaceutical companies have fallen behind, and no matter the size of enterprises, including big brother Hengrui Pharma, it is inevitable to ask: how can a generic drug maker make innovative drugs?
In particular, the listing of domestic PD-1 in 2018 and the opening of the two major exchanges to unprofitable biopharmaceutical companies, the whole capital and industry side, together pushed the innovative drug industry to the peak, and the field of innovative drugs was no different for a while, while traditional pharmaceutical companies once became the most desolate existence.
In fact, in the field of innovative drug research and development, traditional pharmaceutical companies have been slow, but it does not mean that they have completely lost opportunities.
Therefore, with the development of time, the transformation of some big pharmaceutical companies, such as Hengrui Pharma, Hansen Pharmaceutical and Unacon, is not smooth sailing, but it is natural because they have money and resources.
Subversion began when Baekje Shenzhou surpassed Hengrui and became the first brother of innovative medicine.
In 2022, the revenue of innovative drugs of the former surpassed that of the latter for the first time. This means that the leader of the domestic innovative drug market has changed hands. The young Baekje Shenzhou is still soaring, and its overall revenue may soon surpass that of Hengrui Pharma.
A number of new biotech faces have also begun to emerge. For example, in the emerging field of small nucleic acid drugs, Bowang Pharmaceutical, established in 2021, reached a cooperation with Novartis with a down payment of 185 million US dollars and a potential transaction of 4.165 billion US dollars to jointly develop a variety of cardiovascular siRNA drugs;
Yilian Bio, established in 2020, has successively reached cooperation with Roche and BioNTech with the story of its new generation ADC.
The research and development achievements of a new generation of biotech began to appear, which was expected by the market, because they were born for innovation.
The real subversion may be that a group of unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies have even begun to make medicines.
There was Bai Li Tian Heng, who was born in 2023. On December 12th, BL-B01D1, a dual-antibody ADC drug developed by Bailey Tianheng, was license out to Bristol-Myers Squibb with a total transaction amount of up to $8.3 billion.
This not only set a down payment record for the domestic innovative drug license out transaction, but also set a new record for the total price of the global ADC single drug transaction.
Who is Bai Li Tian Heng? Prior to this, its label was more "a Sichuan imitation pharmaceutical company".
Later, Xiangxue Pharmaceutical, the leader of A-share new cell therapy, rose by 227.5% in 11 trading days with the first overseas TCR-T therapy listed.
TAEST16001 injection developed by its subsidiary Xiangxue Life Sciences has been included in the list of breakthrough therapeutic varieties, and it is expected to become the first TCR-T cell therapy drug listed in China.
Who is Xiangxue Pharmaceutical? Prior to this, its label was more "anti-infective Chinese patent medicine enterprises". But this time, Xiangxue’s logic has changed, from an old Chinese patent medicine company to a leading company in advanced cell therapy.
Looking back, how did Xiangxue Pharmaceuticals make it?
How are the fragrant snows tempered?
Let’s look at Xiangxue Pharmaceutical first.
As an old Chinese medicine enterprise, it has neither the abundant internal resources of other big pharmaceutical companies nor the financial resources bought by buy buy willfully. How did a company relying on Chinese herbal medicines and oral liquid win the first domestic TCR-T therapy crown?
The story will start in 2012. At that time, Li Yi, a big cow in the field of cellular immunotherapy, returned to China to join the Guangzhou Institute of Biomedicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and established a research platform, but he still needed to find a company to land.
When Li Yi worked in Avidex founded by Oxford University, he invented the guided evolution technology of TCR and used it to isolate and optimize the world’s first human-derived soluble TCR with high affinity, which opened the way for TCR to move from scientific research to clinical practice. Thanks to this key technological breakthrough, Immuncore, the leading company of TCR-T, has gradually developed from an early biotechnology company hatched by Oxford University to a company with multiple clinical products.
After returning home, by chance, Li Yi met Wang Yonghui, chairman of Xiangxue Pharmaceutical, and the two agreed to set up a life science research center and jointly establish a laboratory within Xiangxue Pharmaceutical.
Since 2013, Xiangxue Pharmaceutical has recruited scientists headed by Li Yi and Gong Haiping, which led to Xiangxue Life Science, which later became TCR-T.
In external reports, Xiangxue Pharmaceutical paid a price of 180 million yuan in five years for the promotion of TCR-T project. Among them, TAEST16001 has made the fastest progress. According to the wall newspaper data presented at this year’s ASCO meeting, as of April 2024, eight subjects were selected into the phase II clinical trial of TAEST16001, with the best remission rate of 50% and the median progression-free survival (mPFS) of 5.9 months.
From an industry perspective, the leading TCR-T company Immunocore, Adaptimmune, which just promoted the world’s first TCR-T therapy to be listed at the beginning of the month, and Xiangxue Life Sciences, the research and development teams of these three companies were actually one more than 10 years ago, that is, Avidex, where Li Yi worked.
From this point of view, several TCR-T products that are currently in the front line are only a few technologies transformed from the academic circles at that time, and they have landed in different countries and enterprises at the same time.
TCR-T is similar to CAR-T in mechanism. Compared with CAR-T, TCR is more similar to natural T cells in human body (CAR is only a fragment), which is not only safer, but also transmits stimulation signals to cells through TCR-CD3 complex. Therefore, TCR-T can not only identify antigens on tumor surface, but also identify antigens inside tumor. Therefore, TCR-T is more suitable for the treatment of solid tumors.
Even if it is a promising field, it needs practical results to prove its value. CAR-T therapy is widely known, largely thanks to successful cases like Emily’s, and then a variety of products have been listed one after another, opening a new era of cell therapy.
Although TCR-T therapy has great potential in theory, there is no product that really stands firm in the market.
Back to 12 years ago, not many companies were willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and continue to transfuse blood every year to bet on a track with uncertain future. Xiangxue has paid a lot for this. At present, the debt ratio of the company exceeds 70%, which is much higher than that of its peers such as Jichuan Pharmaceutical, which is about 20%.
Let’s look at Bai Li Tian Heng again.
Its development history can be traced back to 1996, when it started as a generic drug. At that time, Baili Tianheng’s predecessor, Baili Pharmaceutical, was established. Under the leadership of its founder, Yi Zhu, it launched the first generic drug, ribavirin granules, which once became a big single product.
Yi Zhu’s career is also "unusual". He majored in radio science, and later he got a master’s degree in biophysics from Fudan University and a doctor’s degree in corporate finance from Sichuan University. I have done real estate, set up Baili Pharmaceutical, and after taking the generic route, I took the sales team to fight in the front line.
Under the influence of drug quantity procurement and consistency evaluation, the company’s generic drug business revenue has been declining year by year, and the losses have been increasing. No one will believe that such a generic pharmaceutical company will make a name for itself in the field of innovative drugs. So, after the announcement of its deal with BMS, some people asked, who is Bailey Tianheng?
As early as 2008, Yi Zhu began to dabble in innovative drugs. Regrettably, after several years of tossing, many projects all failed.
However, he did not give up making innovative drugs. In 2014, he established an innovative pharmaceutical company in Seattle, Systimune. Ltd, which focused on the research and development of tumor drugs, and set up a research and development team.
At that time, Yi Zhu wrote a manuscript of the company’s plan for the next ten years: double antibodies, multi-antibodies and ADC drugs. At that time, the listing of TDM1 did not attract the attention of the industry. ADC drugs were at a low point in the United States, but he proposed to do double-antibody ADC.
It is believed that the toxicity problem of monoclonal antibody ADC has not been solved for the time being, and the uncertainty of dual antibody ADC will only be higher. However, Yi Zhu believes that technical problems can be solved, and it only takes time and investment: if there is a risk, strengthen the risk tolerance; If the resources are not enough, then think about how to get them back.
In June, 2023, Bailey Tianheng reported the first human clinical phase I research data of BL-B01D1 at ASCO meeting. BL-B01D1, which was not optimistic in 2014, was developed by Bailey Tianheng.
The results showed that the overall ORR was 45.3% when the median follow-up was 4.1 months, including 63.2% for EGFR mutant NSCLC, 44.9% for EGFR wild-type NSCLC and 53.6% for NPC patients.
It is such data that has contributed to its cooperation with BMS.
03 Tear off the "label"
In the eyes of the market, there may be only one truly smooth path for the transformation of generic pharmaceutical companies in China.
That is, to become a giant, after having a lot of resources, to acquire an already formed innovative drug system, or license in real innovative drugs, but most generic pharmaceutical companies are not enough.
The biggest argument for questioning the transformation of small-scale traditional pharmaceutical companies is that the development of new drugs abroad takes ten years and costs one billion dollars. A generic pharmaceutical company has a profit of only tens of millions of RMB a year. Why should it be a truly innovative drug?
Objectively speaking, such doubts are reasonable and normal. But it is this solidified way of thinking that increases the sense of separation and subversion in the field of innovative drugs.
For example, no matter Xiangxue Pharmaceutical or Baili Tianheng, we can see that the unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies can actually make innovative drugs.
Undeniably, there is a wave of speculation based on expectations behind Xiangxue Pharmaceutical’s stock price surge, and the clinical results are still unknown, and the skyrocketing speculation has come and gone quickly. In fact, its clinical data has also been questioned by some insiders, such as why the sample size is so small? How are 8 patients screened? Can you reproduce the same eye-catching data under the premise of increasing the number of overseas samples?
Everything has yet to be verified by time.
After the release of clinical data, Baili Tianheng was also questioned. When it reached a cooperation with BMS, it was regarded as a "dark horse" in the field of innovative drugs in China. It is also a medicine. After being endorsed by big pharmaceutical companies, the attitude of the market has changed rapidly.
Behind this, more is the role of "labels". Instead of directly judging the value of the drug itself, it is better to see who made it, who invested it and who bought it. Based on such a "label", it is easier to draw new and recognized conclusions.
Although it is important who made it and who bought it, even top researchers can’t violate the objective laws of the industry; Top multinational pharmaceutical companies can’t guarantee the success rate of every project and every transaction.
Perhaps, it is time for us to "label" thinking and treat "innovation" correctly.
In all fields, many times, things that others think can’t be done are not necessarily as difficult as they think. Just like the athletes who broke the monopoly of Europeans and Americans in this year’s Olympic Games, Pan Zhanle in swimming and queen Zheng Qinwen in tennis.
The same applies to the field of innovative drugs. There is no taking it for granted, and there is no impossibility. It is more a combination of necessity and accident.
Returning to the logic of innovative drug research and development, the achievements presented by Xiangxue Pharmaceutical and Baili Tianheng are, in essence, more a result of the innovative layout started 10 years ago; The key factor that determines how they will be three or five years later is the current layout and investment.
No matter whether it is biotech or traditional large pharmaceutical companies or small pharmaceutical companies, no one can succeed casually. It needs money, people and strategies, but also needs to advance and persist. What’s more, innovation is a divergent competition.
There is no absolute center for drug research and development, and the core depends on the efficacy of the product. The curative effect is determined by different principles and technical routes, and no one can monopolize and preset the results.
Because there is no fixed number of medicines.