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

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