Cir­ca 2016, Chi­na se­cured its sta­tus as the sec­ond-biggest mar­ket for pre­scrip­tion drugs. The soar­ing de­mand for med­i­cines has fu­eled the re­turn of key sci­en­tif­ic tal­ent, the ap­petite for spend­ing on drug re­search and de­vel­op­ment, while Chi­na’s cost ad­van­tage has lured multi­na­tion­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal mak­ers to set up R&D shops in the re­gion and stim­u­lat­ed the do­mes­tic CRO in­dus­try. In 2007, a for­mer Quin­tiles (now IQVIA) ex­ec­u­tive set up his own CRO in Chi­na — Foun­tain Med­ical De­vel­op­ment Lim­it­ed (FMD) — and on Fri­day, the com­pa­ny un­veiled a $62 mil­lion Se­ries D round of fi­nanc­ing.

Dan Zhang

The com­pa­ny, set up by Dan Zhang, orig­i­nal­ly tar­get­ed a niche mar­ket that has been ne­glect­ed by both glob­al and lo­cal CROs. Glob­al CROs cater large­ly to multi­na­tion­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal mak­ers, as lo­cal phar­ma play­ers are of­ten priced out of their ser­vices. Mean­while, do­mes­tic CROs fo­cus on serv­ing lo­cal drug de­vel­op­ers, since they are not usu­al­ly equipped with the re­sources re­quired to con­duct in­ter­na­tion­al mul­ti­cen­ter tri­als.

FMD was cre­at­ed to “an­swer the needs of in­no­v­a­tive, sin­gle com­pound com­pa­nies en­ter­ing the clin­i­cal stage. They are main­ly lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al start-ups that are not ful­ly es­tab­lished yet so most of their fi­nanc­ing comes from the gov­ern­ment or grants. Nor­mal­ly, they would be look­ing to start Phase I clin­i­cal tri­als,” Zhang said in an in­ter­view ear­li­er this year with C-suite pub­li­ca­tion PharmaBoard­room.

The CRO in­dus­try in Chi­na — which in­cludes glob­al play­ers such as IQVIA, Lab­Corp and Parex­el and do­mes­tic out­fits in­clud­ing Wuxi AppTec, Phar­maron, and Mei­di­cilon — was worth about $9.7 bil­lion last year, ac­cord­ing to da­ta com­piled by mar­ket re­search com­pa­ny Re­portLink­er, which es­ti­mates that num­ber will climb to rough­ly $34.3 bil­lion by 2025.

In 2017, Chi­na joined the In­ter­na­tion­al Coun­cil for Har­mo­niza­tion of Tech­ni­cal Re­quire­ments for Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals for Hu­man Use (ICH), an or­ga­ni­za­tion that brings to­geth­er reg­u­la­tors of the bio­phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal in­dus­try glob­al­ly to as­sess the sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal as­pects of drug de­vel­op­ment.

With the stan­dard­iza­tion of clin­i­cal re­search in Chi­na through ICH, FMD is now fo­cused on at­tract­ing bio­phar­ma play­ers — in­clud­ing the small­er sin­gle-com­pound biotechs from the Unit­ed States and Eu­rope who pre­vi­ous­ly would have out-li­censed their prod­ucts to multi­na­tion­al phar­ma com­pa­nies or to lo­cal Chi­nese com­pa­nies — to Chi­na.

The new in­jec­tion of funds will en­able “Foun­tain Med­ical to ex­pand and im­prove our ser­vice of­fer­ings to ex­ist­ing glob­al clients, and bet­ter cater to the needs of Chi­nese phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies with glob­al as­pi­ra­tions as well as multi­na­tion­al com­pa­nies with Chi­na as­pi­ra­tions,” Zhang said in a state­ment on Fri­day.

This round of fi­nanc­ing for FMD — which has more than 1,700 em­ploy­ees world­wide cov­er­ing 55 cities in Chi­na, as well as ma­jor de­liv­ery cen­ters across the Unit­ed States, Eu­rope, Japan, In­dia, and the Philip­pines — was led by Gold­man Sachs, with Lil­ly Asia Ven­tures as co-in­vestor.

Be­fore co-found­ing FMD, Zhang worked with Sig­ma-Tau Re­search as well as Quin­tiles. He is a mem­ber of the grant re­view com­mit­tee for the Na­tion­al Drug De­vel­op­ment Fund of Chi­na and serves as a con­sul­tant for the Na­tion­al Med­ical Prod­ucts Ad­min­is­tra­tion (NM­PA). He is al­so a mem­ber of the ICH E19 Ex­pert Work­ing Group.

The Endpoints News team is continuing to track IPO filings for 2021, and we’ve designed a new tracker page for the effort.

Check it out here: Biopharma IPOs 2021 from Endpoints News

You’ll be able to find all the biotechs that have filed and priced so far this year, sortable by quarter and listed by newest first. As of the time of publishing on Feb. 25, there have already been 16 biotechs debuting on Nasdaq so far this year, with an additional four having filed their S-1 paperwork.

The biotech SPAC boom has gone almost hand-in-hand with the industry’s IPO gold rush, and this week saw more blank check companies hop aboard the train.

Leading the way is Perceptive Advisors’ fourth SPAC, appropriately named Arya Sciences Acquisition IV, which priced Friday morning after raising $130 million. And on top of that, new Ziopharm executive chair James Huang is launching his own SPAC with MSD Partners and Panacea Venture, filing S-1 paperwork Thursday with plans to raise $200 million.

Not even one month after Big Pharma took notice of Artiva when Merck signed a collaboration worth nearly $2 billion in milestones, the off-the-shelf NK cell biotech already has its next big fundraise.

Artiva returns from the venture well Friday with a $120 million Series B round, money they will use to get their first program into the clinic and to file INDs for another two candidates. The raise marks the latest development in a rapidly expanding footprint for Artiva, which, in addition to the Merck deal last month, has now raised almost $200 million since its Series A last June.