Michelle Xia gained experience at U.S. pharmaceutical firms before launching her own biotech company back home in China. In a trial last year, the firm’s cancer drug outperformed the world’s best seller–and its surging stock just made her a billionaire.

Michelle Xia spent a dozen years in research and biotech in the U.S. before relocating back to her native China for a job at American life sciences contract research company Crown Bioscience. It didn’t take long for her to realize that patients in her home country needed to wait a much longer time than Americans to get the newest and best medicines. Back then, she says, it took eight to ten years for drugs that had been approved in the U.S. to become available in China.

“There was not much innovation in China” in drug development then, Xia recalls. China was producing copies of U.S. drugs, but with a big lag time. Armed with the ambition to change that and ample industry experience, she launched a biotech company in 2012 with two former Crown Bioscience colleagues and one other cofounder in the southern city of Zhongshan–west of Hong Kong. She took the lead as CEO, chairwoman and president of the startup, which they named Akeso–after a Greek goddess of healing.

Now, five years after taking Akeso public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the company’s standout lung cancer drug has captured outsized attention in the pharmaceutical world. In a Phase 3 trial in China last year comparing Akeso’s drug ivonescimab to Merck’s Keytruda–the world’s best-selling drug, with nearly $30 billion in 2024 sales–the Akeso drug outperformed Keytruda.

The fact that a drug from a little known Chinese firm beat Merck’s bestseller has led to a runup in Akeso’s shares, which nearly tripled in value in the past year. That has turned 58-year-old Xia into a billionaire–with a $1.2 billion fortune, based on her and her family’s 8.5% stake in the company, Forbes estimates. She is one of just nine Chinese women billionaires in healthcare (including two who inherited their fortunes)–and one of 13 self-made women billionaires in healthcare globally.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/20...merck-in-china/



This post has been edited by 30624770: Yesterday, 07:35 AM

new stock to goreng

The story of Huawei will repeating itself

kasi ban or more tariff on this drugs soon