Special Report: China

Of Sea Turtles And Seagulls

by Mike May

Most female sea turtles return to their own hatching site to nest. Likewise, some Chinese experts in biotechnology "swim" off to other countries to gain education and experience, then return home to build their "nests," such as healthcare companies and biotechs. Other Chinese biotech experts turn into seagulls, flying back and forth from one spot to another. Here, sea turtles and seagulls from China tell their stories and describe the ups and downs of being a part of the biotech community in their homeland.

Guo-Liang Yu

"I’M A SEAGULL, RATHER THAN a sea turtle,” says Guo-Liang Yu. “I go back and forth between the U.S. and China about seven or eight times each year.” Although he runs a company in the U.S., several aspects of China lure him home. “It’s not just the economic opportunities,” he explains. “There are also opportunities there in innovation and the ability to use fewer resources to domore.” The latter incentive cannot be ignored by anyone working in the “money-burning business” of biotech, says Yu. “Biotech resources are always limited.

In short, Yu makes it clear that biotechs can get more for their money in China. “I can have five people work on a project for the same money that it takes to get one in the U.S.,” he says. On top of the financial savings, he adds, “I get the wisdom of five people, too.”

Yu also finds the environment there uplifting for scientists. “The community is very upbeat,” he says. “If I need a morale boost, I go back to China. It’s amazing how it gives me the feeling that everything is moving forward.”

Born in Shaoxing—a city perhaps known best for cooking wine—Yu left China in 1984, after earning a B.S. in biochemistry at Fudan University in Shanghai. In the U.S., he studied under Elizabeth Blackburn, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on telomeres and telomerase that protect chromosomes. After receiving a Ph.D. in molecular biology in Blackburn’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley, Yu completed post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School. "Then came the big decision of whether to stay in academics or become a research scientist in industry,” Yu recalls. “I chose the latter and never regretted going to industry, because I could make more of a contribution to real life.”

Those contributions came quickly. At Human Genome Sciences in Rockville, Md., “I was a gene hunter,” says Yu. There, he found a gene target that was recently used to develop a drug for lupus.

Soon, however, Yu felt pulled to the entrepreneurial side of biotechnology. “I was starting to get familiar with industry,” he explains. “I had this entrepreneurial blood running in me, and I wanted experience in a managerial situation.” That took Yu to Mendel Biotechnology, a plant company in Hayward, Calif. “There, we were trying to identify plant genes that regulate traits,” he says. Some of those genes are close to going into commercial corn and soybeans, where Yu says they could raise the yield by as much as 10 percent.

But to truly realize his vision, Yu wanted his own company. “I was thinking, if we have all the human genes and proteins identi ed, then we could dig deeper into functions,” he recalls. “We could develop a set of antibodies to study the proteins. We could detect the proteins and their modifications, and perturb their functions.” To that end, he cofounded Epitomics in 2001. This firm employs a proprietary technology for producing rabbit monoclonal antibodies, which can be used to make research and diagnostic reagents, and even therapeutics for humans.

Despite Epitomics’s California location, the company takes Yu back to China, where its subsidiary, Hangzhou Yikang—meaning “good for health”—Biotech employs more than 170 people. In the U.S., Epitomics is in the research stage of developing antibody therapeutics, and the Chinese subsidiary will be used for development. “We have a protein-production facility, using mammalian host cells to produce pharmaceutical materials for clinical studies,” he explains.

So this seagull’s life could improve biotech and healthcare in China, the U.S. and many countries around the world.

Lan Kang

LAN KANG TRAVELS THE WORLD in search of life science executives. Taking time of from a trip to San Francisco, she tells SCientific American Worldview, “I do executive searches for research and development positions in China, and I’m constantly talking to people based in the United States or Europe.” In those searches, Lan finds life science experts growing increasingly interested in opportunities in China. “While companies in many other countries are cutting back on R&D, companies
in China keep expanding,” Lan says.

In 1991, as a new graduate from Zhejiang University, Lan anticipated this life science expansion. She worked in a national-level biotech park in China for a few years, attracting life science–related investment and projects, but as she explains, “I needed more depth.” So she moved to the U.S., where she earned an M.S. in biochemistry from Tulane University. Afterward, she worked in cancer research, first at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and then exploring drug discovery at Wyeth in Pearl River, N.Y. “But I decided to go into the business side of healthcare,” Lan says. That took her to an M.B.A. from the Wharton School. In 2002, she returned to China to do healthcare consulting work at McKinsey & Company. She joined Korn/Ferry in 2007.

Now, with an understanding of healthcare research and a business background built in China and the U.S., Lan searches for experts to drive her country’s life science industry. “There are growing numbers of Chinese returnees who wanted to move back to contribute to the life science sector growth in China,” she says, “as well as Westerners who are truly fascinated with Asian culture and have a passion to do something in China.”

Keting Chu

BORN ON THE BANKS OF THE Yellow River in the Mongolian city of Baotou, Keting Chu now follows her dreams in healthcare. After earning an M.D. from Sun Yat-sen University of Medical Sciences in southern China, she felt frustrated. “I specialized in infectious disease,” Chu explains, “and in the early 1980s China had an epidemic of viral hepatitis, but there was no treatment.” In the hope of getting into the battle, Chu traveled to the U.S., where she earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of California, San Francisco.

“ To do what I wanted in terms of certifying the processes to a U.S. FDA standard, I needed to raise venture capital, and early 2005 was a little too early for the U.S. VCs to invest in China. ”

Chu’s career has included positions at a range of healthcare companies, including a contract research organization in China that she tried to start in 2005. A year later, though, she left . “To do what I wanted in terms of certifying the processes to a U.S. FDA standard, I needed to raise venture capital, and early 2005 was a little too early for the U.S. VCs to invest in China.”

The timing, however, could be just right for her current company, Mission Therapeutics, in San Francisco. The firm has a proprietary target that is specific for adenocarcinomas, including breast, colon, lung and prostate cancers, that account for 40 percent of all cancers. According to Chu, “We can use this target to develop diagnostics and treatments.”

Despite having returned to the U.S., Chu sees a bright future for biotech in China. “For the cost of doing one drug target in the U.S., you can do maybe three or four in China,” she says, noting that her current company does work in Asia. “Our most advanced cancer vaccine is in a clinical trial in Hong Kong.” And in the future, Chu hopes to be a part of her homeland’s growing biotech community, with plans to start a new venture in a biotechnology park in Tianjin, China.

James Li

THIS SEA TURTLE COMPLETED the journey from China to the U.S. and back more than once in the name of advancing global healthcare. Born in the seaport city of Ningbo, Li moved to Shanghai at the age of two, and lived there until completing his medical degree and internship at Shanghai Medical University. Then, his first sea-turtle migration began.

Li earned a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Montana. After graduation, he recalls, “I joined Merck in early 1991 as a bench scientist.” His work there progressed to clinical research and then regulatory affairs, which led him from the U.S. to Hong Kong, where he looked after Merck’s Asian-Pacific interest. As he moved higher up in Merck management and widened his responsibilities into marketing and franchise management, Li went back to Merck’s U.S. headquarters, although he continued to work on Asian-Pacific projects.

In late 2006, Li joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a Menlo Park, Calif.–based VC firm that backed Genentech, Google and other legendary Silicon Valley companies. KPCB also runs the $200 million Pandemic Preparedness and BioDefense Initiative, which is dedicated to fighting bird flu and other emerging infectious diseases. This career move took Li back to the East. In 2006, he says, “We felt that our fund would be able to help scientists and entrepreneurs to further focus on translating new discoveries and technologies into tools fighting emerging diseases like bird flu. We were looking for tools in rapid diagnostics, new vaccine technologies and medicines to contain bird flu, and later, it turned out that some of these technologies could also be applied to swine flu and other emerging infectious diseases.”

When asked about the change he has seen in pharmaceutical opportunities in China, Li blurts out, “It’s huge!” Thinking back to when he started working in the Asian-Pacific region’s pharma market in 1994, he says, “Except for Japan, the market size was very small. At that stage, the pharma market in China lagged behind many countries: Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea. Now, globally, China is the number one market in terms of growth rate and number three in terms of total size, just behind the U.S. and Japan.”

In part, Li credits changes in China’s policy and regulatory environment for the market growth. “The government is determined to make the pharma-biotech industry one of the national growth priorities and trying to make the regulatory requirements more transparent,” he explains. Nevertheless, Li still sees room for improvement in China’s regulatory environment, which he views as slow, especially in the case of entirely new compounds. “Most of the drugs that have been developed in China have been generics,” he explains, “and there have not been that many new molecular entities, so the reviewers don’t have much experience with that.”

Even with regulatory issues remaining, Li sees many reasons to develop drugs in China. “There are so many benefits,” he says. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many companies pouring in to set up R&D centers. For one thing, China’s aging population drives an increasing demand for pharmaceuticals.” Li adds that the government—both central and locally—is determined to be a global player in the pharma-biotech industry.

As China’s healthcare industries grow, Li envisions worldwide advances. “This is great for China and great for the world,” he says. “Medicine is medicine, and there will be global benefits.”