Biotech Values

[jq1234]

Biotech Innovation:

This is something biotech investor should pay attention to what big Biopharma are saying and doing because they are on the ground over there in China, have much better picture than investors overall.

I didn’t pay much attention to Chinese biotech except occasionally looking at the very few listed here until 2022 when MRK licensed TROP2 ADC from Kelun while almost everyone knew it was in negotiation to buy SGEN. Looked closer I was very surprised to discover how many different ADC platforms out there and how advanced they were! Sure they aren’t novel targets - don’t need to because of tons of failed ADC targets in the past due to narrow therapeutic windows - but they were able to do complex engineering through combination of linker/payload and monospecific or bispecific antibody to have differentiated profiles. That’s real innovation not copy/paste like so many assumed, and the main reason why so many big biopharma have been looking and licensing there - I don’t think cheap is necessarily the main reason - cheaper and better in many instances that is difficult to pass up. Look at SMMT, MRK license of PD1xVEGF, BMY license of EGFRxHER3 ADC, they paid innovation price upfront not copycat price because these are differentiated assets they couldn’t find similar products in the west at similar stages.

As of replicating clinical data from China, MRK ran own trials on Kelun TROP2 ADC then pushed it to 10 ph3 trials in past year. Among oncology drugs with ph3 trials from China only and later global trials, for example Beigene, JNJ/LEGN, Takeda, I haven’t found results diverged that much at all - need to separate small bios licensed early stage assets with questionable clinical data from China to begin with.