China greenlights second homegrown PD-1 in 10 days as Innovent celebrates its first drug OK with Eli Lilly
You can count on the crowded pool of made-in-China checkpoint inhibitors to ripple fast.
Chinese regulators have handed an approval to Innovent and its partners at Eli Lilly for sintilimab, just 10 days after Junshi scored the historic OK for its own homegrown PD-1.
Sintilimab is the fourth checkpoint to be approved in China and, so far, the only one jointly developed by a multinational drugmaker and a local biotech (the other two are Merck’s Keytruda and Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo). Its manufacturing operations — a critical field in the marketing battles to come — is the largest in the country (at three 1000L lines currently) and has passed muster with Lilly, CEO Michael Yu told PharmCube in an interview.
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