CHINESE DRUG MAKER AKESO HAILED AS BIOTECH’S ‘DEEPSEEK MOMENT’ AMID US COMPETITION

Akeso’s immunotherapy drug allowed half of its patients to go 11.1 months without their condition worsening Chinese drug maker Akeso, whose new cancer drug has outperformed a leading Western peer in clinical studies, is being hailed as the “DeepSeek moment” for China’s drug industry, as biotech emerges as a new front in the escalating US-China tech war.

Akeso’s global innovation centre in Shanghai. Photo: Handout

Akeso’s new immunotherapy drug targeting non-small cell lung cancer, called ivonescimab, allowed half of its patients to go 11.1 months without their condition worsening, a metric known as median progression-free survival (PFS), according to phase 3 clinical trial results the company published in The Lancet last week.

The median PFS for pembrolizumab – the world’s most popular cancer drug, sold by US pharmaceutical giant Merck under the brand name Keytruda – was 5.8 months by comparison, the study said.

Akeso, which first unveiled the findings in September last year at an international industry conference, garnered increased attention in China recently after a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference introduced ivonescimab at the “two sessions” last week.

Media outlets have referred to Akeso’s cancer drug development as the Chinese biotech industry’s “DeepSeek moment”. Last month, Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the global tech industry with its high performance artificial intelligence (AI) models developed at a much lower cost than its peers.

The breakthrough was seen as a sign of resilience by China’s tech industry under tight US restrictions on AI chips.

Ivonescimab is a type of immunotherapy known as PD-1 inhibitors, which are antibodies that help the immune system recognise and kill cancer cells.

If the Akeso drug’s efficacy is validated in more upcoming clinical tests, it means that China has gone from lagging behind the US by five years in the PD-1 field to leading by three years, Chinese venture capital fund Frees Fund wrote in a research report published on Wednesday.

Akeso was founded in 2012 in Zhongshan, a city in China’s southern Guangdong province.
The company kicked off with a 20 million yuan (US$2.76 million) angel investment, and received rent subsidies and equipment support from the local government, founder and CEO Michelle Xia said in an interview with Hong Kong online outlet Speakout HK in 2021.

Xia held senior positions at Western pharmaceutical companies including Bayer and Crown Bioscience before returning to China and establishing Akeso.

Xia decided to start a drug discovery venture because China had virtually no pharmaceutical companies developing new drugs at the time, and it would take eight to 10 years for newly launched foreign innovative drugs to reach Chinese patients, and even then at high prices, according to the transcript of a speech Xia gave at her alma mater Sun Yat-sen University in June last year.

Akeso went public in Hong Kong in April 2020, with its HK$2.58 billion (US$330 million) offering oversubscribed 639 times.

The company, with several other cancer drugs in the pipeline, has licensed ivonescimab to US firm Summit Therapeutics for development and commercialisation in global markets in a US$5 billion deal.

Source: MSN

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