The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have raised the importance of venture capital funding for Chinese bio/pharma companies involved in the development of drugs to treat infectious diseases over the past two years, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Sharon Cartic, MSc, Associate Director for Drugs and Business Fundamentals at GlobalData, comments: “Venture financing for Chinese bio/pharma for infectious disease innovator drugs saw a 277% increase from $163m in 2017 to $615m in October 2021.”

An analysis of GlobalData’s Pharma Intelligence Center deals database reveals that, as in the rest of the world, oncology has consistently remained the top therapy area over the last five years for Chinese bio/pharma venture financing for foreign innovator drugs, raising a total of $3.8bn compared to only $1.4bn for infectious disease.

Cartic continues: “Despite China’s IPO regulation shakeup there is still a way to go to meet the numbers of innovator drug approvals compared to the US and EU.”

Recently, China went through regulatory and IPO reforms including the launch of The Shanghai Stock Exchange Science and Technology Innovation Board (STAR) in July 2019 to increase innovator drug development and encourage innovative companies to list before they have a marketed product.

Cartic concludes: “While the first Chinese-developed oncology innovator drug, Brukinsa (zanubrutinib) by BeiGene, only received the US FDA approval in November 2019, it remains to be seen how many more Chinese-originating innovator drug approvals will be seen in western countries such as the US and EU in the future.”

• Deals include innovator drugs only for marketed, pre-registration, phase I, II, III, preclinical, and discovery for all geographies globally except China. A deal can be tagged to more than one therapy area based on the therapy areas related to the drugs for that deal.
• Includes deal values for all announced deals between 2017 and 12 October 2021