A Hong Kong-based an­ti­body mak­er has filed for an IPO on the HKEX, mark­ing the first tru­ly home­grown com­pa­ny to take ad­van­tage of new rules that al­low pre-rev­enue biotechs to list on the stock ex­change.

Shawn Le­ung HK­IB

Founder and CEO Shawn Le­ung calls SinoMab an in­dus­try pi­o­neer in the re­gion, hav­ing start­ed out in 2002 with sup­port from Morn­ing­side — at a time the city’s lead­ers ap­peared more in­ter­est­ed in “ra­tio­nal­iza­tion” of Chi­nese med­i­cine. Le­ung, an Ox­ford-ed­u­cat­ed lo­cal who trained in the US first as a post­doc then at Im­munomedics, came up with his own frame­work for hu­man­iz­ing an­ti­bod­ies. That formed the ba­sis of SinoMab’s cur­rent pipeline, which com­pris­es a lead an­ti-CD22 drug, a BTK in­hibitor, and four oth­er pre­clin­i­cal mAbs.

With SM03, SinoMab is tar­get­ing some of the biggest in­di­ca­tions in im­munol­o­gy: rheuma­toid arthri­tis (PhI­II), sys­temic lu­pus ery­the­mato­sus (PhI) and Sjö­gren’s syn­drome (IND), in ad­di­tion to non-Hodgkin’s lym­phoma (PhII).

While Le­ung has kept the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters in Hong Kong’s Sci­ence Park, he’s al­so ex­pand­ed SinoMab’s foot­print, with an of­fice in Shen­zhen, a pro­duc­tion plant in Hainan and a sub­sidiary in Aus­tralia to fa­cil­i­tate clin­i­cal tri­als.

“In fu­ture, we ex­pect to lean more to­wards Chi­na be­cause we are in­creas­ing­ly see­ing that that is where the tal­ent, the mar­ket and the mon­ey are,” he said in a 2017 in­ter­view with Phar­ma Board­room. “As we are look­ing to po­si­tion our­selves for mar­ket ap­proval, we are cur­rent­ly in­vest­ing in a new man­u­fac­tur­ing plant in Chi­na and we need chan­nels to source the mon­ey for that. An ex­pand­ed pres­ence in Chi­na will al­so help us ex­pand our port­fo­lio and gain more col­lab­o­ra­tion, both lo­cal­ly and glob­al­ly.”

Le­ung, who’s al­so a mem­ber of the HKEX’s biotech ad­vi­so­ry board, adds that Hong Kong, nev­er­the­less, re­tains a cru­cial edge with re­gards to in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty:

This is not some­thing that com­pa­nies nec­es­sar­i­ly want to do in Chi­na; if an em­ploy­ee de­cides to leave with valu­able da­ta, the sheer phys­i­cal size and pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty of Chi­na mean that he can eas­i­ly dis­ap­pear with­out a trace. In Hong Kong, the in­fra­struc­ture is trust­wor­thy and ro­bust. The biotech com­mu­ni­ty is al­so rather close-knit. This is why no mat­ter how SinoMab grows in the fu­ture, pro­to­type R&D will al­ways be done here and we will on­ly go to Chi­na for the scale-up.

Those would be key sell­ing points for Hong Kong to con­tin­ue com­pet­ing with oth­er biotech hubs in Chi­na — most no­tably Shang­hai, which re­cent­ly opened up its own biotech board.

Open­ing up the stock mar­ket to biotech is go­ing to build up an en­tire biotech ecosys­tem around it. The im­pli­ca­tions go way be­yond the stock mar­ket. There will be dozens of R&D fo­cused com­pa­nies in the com­ing years as a re­sult of it.

— Brad Lon­car (@brad­lon­car) Ju­ly 8, 2019

SinoMab has ac­cu­mu­lat­ed a num­ber of Chi­nese in­vestors af­ter five ven­ture rounds. Aside from the 21.7% Le­ung holds via Skytech Tech­nol­o­gy, there are three oth­er big share­hold­ers: Forbes Cap­i­tal So­lu­tions claims 24.21%, Hainan Haiyao con­trols 18.45%, and Apri­cot has a 25.83% stake pri­or to the IPO.

So­cial im­age: Shut­ter­stock

It’s official. Memorial Sloan Kettering has picked a brain cancer expert as its new physician-in-chief and CMO, replacing José Baselga, who left under a cloud after being singled out by The New York Times and ProPublica for failing to properly air his lucrative industry ties.

His replacement, who now will be in charge of MSK’s cutting-edge research work as well as the cancer care delivered by hundreds of practitioners, is Lisa M. DeAngelis. DeAngelis had been chair of the neurology department and co-founder of MSK’s brain tumor center and was moved in to the acting CMO role in the wake of Baselga’s departure.

More than two years ago Ritter Pharmaceuticals managed to find enough silver lining in its Phase IIb/III study — after missing the top-line mark — to propel its lactose intolerance toward a confirmatory trial. But as it turned out, the enthusiasm only set the biotech and its investors up to be sorely disappointed.

This time around there’s little left to salvage. Not only did RP-G28 fail to beat placebo in reducing lactose intolerance symptoms, patients in the treatment group actually averaged a smaller improvement. On a composite score measuring symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating and gas, patients given the drug had a mean reduction of 3.159 while the placebo cohort saw a 3.420 drop on average (one-sided p-value = 0.0106).

An early-stage update on Adverum Biotechnologies’ intravitreal gene therapy has triggered investor concern, after patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) saw their vision deteriorate, despite signs that the treatment is improving retinal anatomy.

Adverum, on Wednesday, unveiled 24-week data from the OPTIC trial of its experimental therapy, ADVM-022, in six patients who have been administered with one dose of the therapy. On average, patients in the trial had severe disease with an average of 6.2 anti-VEGF injections in the eight months prior to screening and an average annualized injection frequency of 9.3 injections.

Too often, Alex Arfaei arrived too late. 

An analyst at BMO Capital Markets, he’d meet with biotech or pharmaceutical heads for their IPO or secondary funding and his brain, trained on a biology degree and six years at Merck and Endo, would spring with questions: Why this biomarker? Why this design? Why not this endpoint? Not that he could do anything about it. These execs were coming for clinical money; their decisions had been made and finalized long ago.