Shoot­ing straight for Ven­clex­ta, a sea­soned Chi­nese CEO has glob­al dreams for his start­up

As one of the found­ing ex­ecs and long­time chief med­ical of­fi­cer at Bet­ta Phar­ma, Fen­lai Tan isn’t just well aware of the al­lure of a me-bet­ter strat­e­gy in Chi­na. He helped cre­ate it.

Over the past 11 years, the biotech — which took its name for the vo­cal re­sem­blance to “bet­ter” — had ac­crued a whop­ping $9.2 bil­lion val­u­a­tion (RMB$60 bil­lion) thanks to a sin­gle drug: ico­tinib, a first-gen­er­a­tion EGFR in­hibitor that be­came Chi­na’s first ap­proved tar­get­ed ther­a­py af­ter prov­ing just as ef­fec­tive as As­traZeneca’s Ires­sa in a head-to-head tri­al, and safer for Chi­nese pa­tients.

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