Trans-Pa­cif­ic bis­pe­cif­ic play­er caps 'very chal­leng­ing' pan­dem­ic year with $120M to gain a foothold among the gi­ants

It’s a nar­ra­tive that we’ve seen over and over again this past year: Covid-19 threw a mon­key wrench in­to clin­i­cal tri­al plans of drugs in oth­er dis­ease ar­eas, forc­ing com­pa­nies to im­pro­vise.

But for EpimAb, the trou­bles were com­pound­ed: The US-Chi­na biotech had care­ful­ly se­lect­ed one clin­i­cal cen­ter in Guang­dong that lung can­cer pa­tients used to vis­it from all over Chi­na, but ear­ly trav­el re­stric­tions vast­ly cut down the num­ber they could re­cruit in­to their Phase I/II tri­al. Mean­while, in the US, clin­i­cal tri­al sites es­sen­tial­ly went in­to hi­ber­na­tion mode, CEO Cheng­bin Wu said in an in­ter­view with lo­cal me­dia last Ju­ly, quash­ing their hopes of gath­er­ing Phase I/II da­ta for the lead bis­pe­cif­ic by the end of 2020 — not to men­tion steer­ing a sec­ond pro­gram in­to the clin­ic.

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