Count Hai­He Bio­phar­ma in the new gen­er­a­tion of Chi­nese biotechs an­swer­ing the clar­i­on call for home­grown in­no­va­tion. The Shang­hai-based drug­mak­er is emerg­ing from rel­a­tive ob­scu­ri­ty with a $146 mil­lion round and the sup­port of some big names in Chi­na’s bio­phar­ma in­dus­try, in­clud­ing Hill­house Cap­i­tal, CSPC Phar­ma as well as the ven­ture arm of the Chi­nese Acad­e­my of Sci­ence. PE firm Hua­gai led the round, which al­so in­volved a siz­able group of in­vestors, such as On­co­Cap­i­tal and Yingke PE. Hai­He Bio­phar­ma was found­ed in 2011 by Jian Ding, the dean of CAS’ Col­lege of Phar­ma­cy, to pur­sue on­col­o­gy drugs. When the com­pa­ny merged with RMX Bio­phar­ma last March, it took on a cou­ple of pain drugs, an an­tibi­ot­ic in-li­censed from Ko­rea’s LogiChem, and a new chief. CEO Ruip­ing Dong, the founder of RMX, has pre­vi­ous­ly run R&D in emerg­ing mar­kets for Bris­tol-My­ers Squibb and As­traZeneca, af­ter fin­ish­ing a post­doc at Dana Far­ber. It is the on­col­o­gy drugs (both clin­i­cal and pre­clin­i­cal) — which were dis­cov­ered in-house — that will claim the ma­jor­i­ty of the new funds. “In the past year, Hai­He Bio­phar­ma has ob­tained more than a dozen clin­i­cal tri­al ap­provals, and has made ma­jor break­throughs in tu­mor tar­get lay­out and clin­i­cal project ad­vance­ment,” Zhiqiang Zeng, man­ag­ing part­ner of Hua­gai Cap­i­tal Med­ical Fund, said in a state­ment. Here’s a peek at Hai­He’s can­cer pipeline — with more than 10 as­sets in to­tal:
Pharmaceutical company HaiHe Biopharma has raised $146m in a funding round led by Huagai and backed by investors including OncoCapital and Yingke . The firm is also supported by Hillhouse Capital , RMX Biopharma and the Chinese Academy of Science ’s venture division. Most of the funding will be used to develop the firm’s clinical and preclinical oncology drugs. It has already won approval for more than 10 trials. CSPC Pharma joined forces with Huagai in last March .