Last No­vem­ber’s news about As­traZeneca launch­ing a $1 bil­lion ven­ture fund with Chi­na In­ter­na­tion­al Cap­i­tal Cor­po­ra­tion (CI­CC) to in­vest in up-and-com­ing play­ers was wide­ly viewed as il­lus­tra­tive of the British drug­mak­er’s am­bi­tions in Chi­na. As it turns out, it’s just as much about CI­CC — Chi­na’s largest in­vest­ment bank — and its plans in bio­med­i­cine.

Days af­ter an­nounc­ing the As­traZeneca fund, state-backed CI­CC dis­closed that it’s team­ing up with 11 do­mes­tic firms to raise a fund ded­i­cat­ed to in­no­v­a­tive drugs, in vit­ro di­ag­no­sis, med­ical tech­nol­o­gy and health IT. It’s now closed at $229 mil­lion (RMB$1.6 bil­lion), ac­cord­ing to a state­ment.

Brand­ed as Chi­na’s an­swer to Gold­man Sachs since it was launched in 1995 with Mor­gan Stan­ley, CI­CC has un­der­writ­ten sev­er­al biotech IPOs in re­cent years in­clud­ing those of I-Mab, Jun­shi and Hen­lius.

CI­CC Cap­i­tal, its pri­vate eq­ui­ty arm, is in charge of man­ag­ing the new fund. With close to $43 bil­lion (RMB$300 bil­lion) in as­sets, CI­CC Cap­i­tal has made bio­med­i­cine one of three pil­lars of its di­rect in­vest­ment port­fo­lio along­side IT and con­sumer busi­ness. Can­cer drug de­vel­op­er Ab­bisko and wound care spe­cial­ist Ten­ry Phar­ma are among its bets.

No­tably, it’s al­so chan­neled its mon­ey in­to VC funds — giv­ing it a stake in big-name health­care-fo­cused play­ers such as Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures, Qim­ing Ven­ture Part­ners, High­Light Cap­i­tal and LYFE Cap­i­tal.

For the new fund, it’s chipped in around $2.9 mil­lion, while Shen­zhen-list­ed Pharscin Phar­ma, Hebei Port Group, Xi­a­men Fig Group, Fu­jian Sun­ner Group, Huirong Qide In­vest­ment, Xi’an Huirong, Xin­wen Ven­ture Cap­i­tal (a sub­sidiary of Sichuan Dai­ly Press Group) and oth­ers pro­vid­ed the rest.

No an­nounce­ment about fund­ing bio­med­i­cine these days is com­plete with­out al­lud­ing to the coro­n­avirus out­break out of Wuhan. CI­CC Cap­i­tal de­vot­ed a con­sid­er­ate por­tion of its brief state­ment to high­light that it’s been in con­tact with mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies to help ac­cel­er­ate de­vel­op­ment of nu­cle­ic acid di­ag­nos­tics, ther­a­peu­tic an­ti­bod­ies, an­tivi­rals as well as vac­cines.

It al­so said its new bio­med­ical fund is the first in­vest­ment fund to have gone through a new fi­nan­cial reg­is­tra­tion path­way set up ear­li­er this month specif­i­cal­ly for funds geared at pre­ven­tion and con­tain­ment of the coro­n­avirus out­break.

“Not on­ly does the Chi­nese bio­med­ical in­dus­try shoul­der great in­no­v­a­tive chal­lenges un­der the epi­dem­ic, it’s al­so ush­ered in a rare de­vel­op­ment op­por­tu­ni­ty,” the firm stat­ed.

The firehose of biopharma news is gushing these days.

That’s why broader and deeper is the theme for 2021 at Endpoints. You can expect new coverage outside our core R&D focus, with deeper reporting in some key areas. When John Carroll and I launched Endpoints nearly five years ago, we were wading in waist-high waters. Now we’re a team of 25 full-time staffers (and growing) with plans to cover the flood of biopharma news, Endpoints-style.

With reports over slowed distribution of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and threats of lawsuits dangling, the European Commission is planning to ask the company for a clarification over delivery timelines.

A spokesman for the EU’s executive branch made the comments early Friday, according to a Reuters report. Pfizer and the Commission had earlier said that there would be no more slowdowns next week as it continues to alter a manufacturing site in Belgium to ramp up production.