BeiGene Brings Biotech to China

Like so many tech entrepreneurs before them, Wang Xiaodong and John V. Oyler met last fall over dinner to discuss how to start a business. It wasn’t the scope of their plans that was unusual, it was the locale. Between bites of stewed beef and honey-soaked cherry tomatoes in a Beijing restaurant, the two discussed how they could mount a small revolution in the pharmaceutical world from China, a country not known for drug development. Their goal: to emulate the success of biotech pioneer Genentech and launch a world-class biotech industry in Beijing focusing on cancer drugs.

Only 10 months later, Wang and Oyler have lured 20 China-born, U.S.-educated scientists from companies including Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, and Merck to help them search for medicines, passed over by other drugmakers, that may yet have the potential to treat cancer, which strikes more than 2.6 million Chinese each year. Their closely held company, BeiGene, already has received financial backing from Merck and is in talks with seven other drugmakers and venture capital firms to raise an additional $100 million to $150 million this year, says Oyler, BeiGene’s chief executive officer. “We want to become the Genentech of China,” he says, referring to the U.S. drug developer that Roche Holding bought for $46.8 billion in 2009. “I’m confident we have built a world-class team that can develop a successful drug.”