Print“Hua is focused on building a new and better way to develop and commercialize drugs, leveraging the best of what the Eastern and Western worlds have to offer.”
Chinese biopharmaceutical startup Hua Medicine has secured $50 million from a syndicate of U.S. and Chinese venture investors to execute its plan to become a premier Chinese drug developer.
Like Ascletis, another recently well-financed startup, Hua plans to in-license promising Western drug candidates to develop and commercialize in China, and also to discover new medicines in China that can be developed globally.
The new company is co-founded by its CEO, Li Chen, who returned to China in 2004 to set up an R&D lab for Roche, and Ge Li, who also founded WuXi PharmaTech, one of China’s biggest contract research organization and a new investor in Hua through its corporate venture fund.
Other investors in Hua include ARCH Venture Partners, Fidelity Biosciences, Fidelity Growth Partners Asia, Venrock, and Sino-Alliance International. These funds are expected to progress Hua's internal development programs as well as provide financial resources for the acquisition, development and commercialization of additional programs.
“Hua is focused on building a new and better way to develop and commercialize drugs, leveraging the best of what the Eastern and Western worlds have to offer,” says Li Chen.
In an interview with ChinaBio Today, Chen said the time is right for Chinese pharma startups because of the changing ecosystem in the country, which he credited to government support and the returnee phenomenon. Thus the new company can leverage the lower-cost yet highest-quality drug discovery capabilities available in China, while partnering or licensing the most promising drug assets from Asia, the United States, and Europe.
The company has already looked at more than one hundred potential in-licensing candidates and picked five it hopes to develop. Chen said Hua will announce its first program before the end of this year, and another one in the first part of 2012, both of which will focus on neurodegenerative disorders and other major unmet medical needs in China. Because drug approvals in China take up to four years, even for drugs already approved elsewhere, the company hopes to launch its product by the end of 2015.
September 23, 2011
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-hua_medicine_lands_50_million_to_finance_its_biotech_activities.html
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