Zai Lab

Positioning itself as the “gateway to China for innovative assets,” Zai currently leans heavily on in-licensing products for China development and commercialization. “Around 70% of innovative drugs have not yet been brought to China, even though they’ve been approved elsewhere,” Du said in a Nature Review Drug Discovery interview in 2018. “So we started with thinking about picking this low-hanging fruit, by in-licensing post-approval projects or compounds that have made it past phase 3.”

Zai’s clinical pipeline covers drugs bought from a broad range of companies, mostly foreign biotechs that don’t have operations in China. Companies Zai has licensed drugs from include GlaxoSmithKline, Regeneron, Incyte, Deciphera, Entasis Therapeutics, Five Prime Therapeutics, MacroGenics, Novocure and Paratek Pharmaceuticals.

In 2016, Zai obtained China rights to Tesaro’s PARP inhibitor Zejula, two years before GSK acquired Tesaro for $5.1 billion. At the end of 2019, the drug was cleared by Chinese authorities as a maintenance therapy for patients with recurrent ovarian cancer who respond to platinum-based chemotherapy, making it Zai Lab’s first commercial product in the Chinese mainland. In September, Zejula was further approved in the front-line maintenance setting.

Headquarters: Shanghai, China

CEO: Samantha Du

Founded: 2014

Website: https://www.zailaboratory.com/