Speech by the Guest of Honour
Ms Nisa Leung, MH, JP
Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners
Dear President Zhang Xiang, Professor Lau Chak Sing, Professor Lo Chung Mau, faculty members, HKU School of Medicine graduates, distinguished guests and so many respectable professors here. Good afternoon.
I am greatly honored by this privilege to address you on your special day and share this moment with you here. First, let me begin by saying: Congratulations! After years of hard work, tears and laughter, stress and loneliness you might have experienced during covid days, you made it this far to go on meaningful journeys as doctors, nurses and researchers. With much respect and admiration, I’d like to applaud you for your patience, resilience, and perseverance in working unremittingly during this uncertain time. Well done! And congrats to the parents and grandparents too for all your hard work!
Whatever path you have chosen, I believe you are all connected and motivated by the same calling – the love of humanity. You chose to major in medicine at a world-leading university like HKU, sacrificing social life and working long hours, because you believe in a shared future where humanity can thrive, you care about it, and you want to make it happen.
Standing here with high caliber talents in the room, I can’t help reminiscing about how I started my career in healthcare many years ago. After graduating from GSB, half of my class did not have a job offer as it was 2001 right after the internet crash, many say is similar to what we are seeing today. I joined a venture fund in Silicon Valley for a year looking at tech and health care investments. My plans changed when an uncle in Guangzhou developed liver cancer and there was very limited therapeutics in China available then. That’s when I decided to leave a well-paid job in San Francisco and cofounded 3 companies licensing in drugs and devices from overseas to treat cancer in China and the first private cancer center in Shanghai… At the time, China 5-year cancer survival rate was 24% vs 66% in US so there was much improvement to be done. It was not easy starting company in China as a HK person. I still remember the minister of health in Luwan district in Shanghai smiled after my presentation on the cancer center and said that she did not understand my Putonghua but she applauded my courage. Years later, we laughed about the time we spent on this project in fluent Putonghua.
In 2006, I set up Qiming health care practice which has since invested and incubated in over 500 companies primarily in China including 180 in healthcare and 100 of those have become subsector leaders in China spanning biotech, medical devices, diagnostics, health care services and health tech. We had 35 IPO’s since march 2020, 27 of them were in health care sector.
Many wonder how much has China health care advanced in the last 20 years. Where are we compared to western countries in our ability to innovate.
According to McKinsey, biopharma in China is nearing an inflection point that other Chinese industries, such as consumer electronics, have already passed through. Biopharma is no longer an “in China for China only” story. Rather, it is an industry that could have a significant impact on the global biopharma value chain. Last year, approvals for new-drug applications from local players in China surpassed those from multinational companies (MNCs) for the first time. 15 Chinese domestically developed innovative drugs were out licensed to MNC’s last year with a medium deal range of USD 900M. In the last few weeks, four of our portfolio companies received four agreements from MNCs in licensing their Chinese innovative drugs for US and European markets. We are at a turning point and you are in the middle of this excitement to make a difference.
One of the first investment I made in 2008 was Gan and Lee. We met Dr Gan and team for the first time in a small 1000 ft2 office in Beijing. It was a small startup then and half of the chairs were broken and donated from friends. They spent all the money building a small pilot plant for their third-generation insulin. Dr Gan was among one of the first batch of scientists who was sent to study PhD in US and he decided to return to China to start an insulin company as around 5-7% of the total population in China are diabetic and the sector is dominated by MNCs including Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. 10 years after our initial investment, the company became the largest domestic insulin company exporting to 25 countries globally and signed US and European marketing right to Novartis and became the first biologics drug company to license to MNC from China. Dr Gan planted over 100,000 trees in their 5.2M ft2 new Beijing campus, with 1,200 R&D member team. Their facility can now manufacture half of global insulin capacity and with economy of scale, they can help drive insulin prices to much more affordable level.
CSL and uniQure's hemophilia B gene therapy Hemgenix was approved by the US FDA this week which costs US$3.5 million per dose, making it the most expensive drug in the world. Question is how many patients can afford this treatment?
One of our portfolio companies Belief Biomed has a similar drug in the pipeline and is expected to sell at a fraction of that when it launches. The founder Prof Xiao Xiao co-founded Bamboo and AskBio in North Carolina and sold to Pfizer and Bayer for USD 630M and USD 4B respectively and decided to start his third gene therapy company in Shanghai as China has much cheaper clinical development cost and manufacturing cost.
Berry Oncology finished a 10,000 men liquid biopsy clinical trial last year, that is a simple blood test, for early-stage liver cancer detection and was able to identify 93 stage 0 and stage 1 liver cancer patients and is exploring early-stage pancreatic cancer detection using same method.
Founders of Cansino Biologics gave up their high paid jobs at Sanofi Pasteur and GSK vaccine and decided to return to China to develop a full suite of children vaccines at global standards given the many incidents and mishaps in the sector and given how expensive imported vaccines are. With their deep knowledge and multiple technology platforms, they also developed the first global inhaled COVID vaccine which recently launched nationwide in China and approved for emergency use overseas.
Sixty of our portfolio companies were at front line helping in Wuhan. We are very proud to see our health care entrepreneurs unite and step up when they are needed.
With convergence of tech and health care, we are seeing a new generation of health tech such as AI imaging, AI pathology, single cell sequencing, surgical robotics, lab automation, brain science, molecular home testing, digital therapy and many more and we have invested in all these areas in China. One of the hardest and most challenging areas is AIDD – AI drug discovery and HK headquartered Insilico Medicine is a leading player in this field globally and signed partnership agreement with Sanofi recently. I like to share these examples with you and hope this will get you excited about biotech and drug development and the social impact it can make to millions of people.
World population just passed 8 billion last week. Top 10 most populated countries are all developing countries besides US and China. Rising aging population, climate change, broad social and economic changes are key issues we are facing. It is more pressing than ever to find ways to tackle the challenges of food supply, hunger, sustainability and access to affordable healthcare for all.
In the last decade, we saw major advancements in new drugs approved saving lives of millions. Covid vaccines, cystic fibrosis, CD19 CAR-T that can cure 80% of chronic leukemia and multiple myeloma patients, gene therapy for rare diseases, hepatitis C that can cure 60 million patients worldwide and many more to come in the next decades just based on technology and new modalities in the lab we see today.
And yet, the annual price of a newly-launched cancer drug in the US averaged $283,000 last year, a 53% increase from 2017. How many countries or patients can afford these drugs? How can we develop affordable drugs and devices? I believe China and HK are the solution to developing affordable health care for the world and this is why it is interesting for you to be graduating this year in Hong Kong and the impact you can potentially make leveraging on Hong Kong’s excellence in basic research, health care system and its close proximity to China and GBA ecosystem and resources.
What I find especially meaningful about speaking to you today, here at HKU, is that you have a unique position to become leaders of healthcare development starting out from Hong Kong, an international hub connecting the East and West. Hong Kong is one of the biotech centers of Asia and the world, where there are world-class research institutions, an advanced financial market, one of the best intellectual property protection systems, cultural diversity, policy and funding support, as well as access to resources of infrastructure facilities and supply chain in China.
As you graduate and realize your ambitions, I like to share with you a few last thoughts. First, this degree is a tool and beginning of your career. You are now one of the privileged and hope you can use the opportunities given to you to build success and share your success with the less opportune. Second, get out of your comfort zone and be bold to try and fail. Innovation often appears not when you lock yourself in the lab or library, but when you practice, talk and listen to your patients, and get feedback during the process. Third, keep learning. This is what we do every day and it’s wonderful to have so many new technologies in this next decade or two to make so many changes in unmet medical needs. Finally, medicine is without borders. We do not let geography or social and cultural differences distract and divide us. Working in healthcare comes with tremendous responsibility, but remember, you are doing this together with fellow graduates sitting next to you, and many people like you around the world. You are never alone in this endeavor.
I’d like to close my speech with a quote from the book When Breath Becomes Air: “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” The path in medicine you chose, just like healthcare investments I have chosen, and our entrepreneurs have chosen, is a lifelong path. Our society needs us more than ever and I look forward to seeing you become healers and conveyors of science, love, and hope. Thank you!
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