2024-03-09 13:00:20
BeiGene Vice President Dr. Du Zhengming introduces the company to foreign journalists in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, China, January 5, 2020. GABRIEL GAUFFRE / XINHUA NEWS AGENCY
BeiGene doesn’t like labels. In the pharmaceutical landscape, biotech, which has just launched in France in January, the marketing of its first treatment approved by the European Union, Brukinsa, has nevertheless become, reluctantly, a symbol. That of a China which no longer intends to be relegated to a simple role as a subcontractor in the pharmaceutical industry, and capable of innovating and shining on the international scene in the same way as its Western peers.
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In 2021, the biotech was in fact the first company to obtain approval from the European Medicines Agency for an innovative anticancer drug developed in China. A distinction on which the laboratory, founded in Beijing in 2010 by an American entrepreneur, John Oyler, and a Chinese researcher, Xiaodong Wang, but which claims three head offices – in China, the United States and Switzerland – remains discreet.
“We are neither Chinese nor American, but an international company. Our motto is: “Cancer has no borders, neither do we” »summarizes the former researcher at the Gustave-Roussy Institute, Ezgi Tasdemir, general director of BeiGene France for two years.
Recruitment of specific teams
The laboratory has specialized, since its launch, in the development of treatments against cancer, a market known to be lucrative in the event of success, but where global competition is fierce. To prevail in the battle, BeiGene has opted for a model that runs counter to that of biotech, by internalizing the different stages of drug development. In particular clinical development, the phase where the effectiveness of a drug is tested on volunteer patients during large trials, and which represents, explains Ezgi Tasdemir, “90% of the costs of developing a new drug in oncology”.
This tactic, which required the recruitment of specific teams (more than three thousand employees, out of the ten thousand in the group, are currently assigned to this task), allows it not only to reduce costs, but also to go faster. Because, unlike companies specializing in this field, which often concentrate their efforts to recruit patients in clinical trials in a handful of hospital centers around the world, which sometimes leads to waiting up to two years to find a sufficient number of volunteers to begin clinical studies, BeiGene does not hesitate to venture off the beaten track and cast a wider net to save time.
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