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.

Pfizer and BioNTech said Friday that they’ve submitted a biologics license application to the FDA for full approval of their mRNA vaccine for those over the age of 16.

How long it will take the FDA to decide on the BLA will be set once it’s been formally accepted by the agency.

Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, previously told Endpoints News that the review of the BLA should take between three and four months, but it may be even faster than that.

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As the Covid-19 pandemic made conventional trials impossible for some drugmakers, more and more companies moved to decentralize their clinical studies, accelerating business for tech developers like Science 37. Leveraging that boost, the company is on the verge of a SPAC merger, landing unicorn status and its very own stock ticker.