If there was an “ah-ha!” moment for Huya Bioscience International, it occurred in 2004, when founder Mireille Gingras was working as a consultant for mid-size biotech companies.
“I was looking for opportunities for in-licensing compounds in China when I found a very interesting drug for Alzheimer’s,” Gingras recalls. The potential for the Chinese drug in the United States and elsewhere was big, but Gingras says she saw an even bigger business opportunity in licensing the legions of drug candidates under development in China.
She ran with her idea, and started Huya at a time when the global pharmaceutical industry faces a pressing need for new drug compounds. Gingras says Huya now has “hundreds” of in-licensed Chinese compounds in its portfolio, which includes a spectrum of pre-clinical and clinical drug candidates in such therapeutic areas as oncology, neurology, immunology, and hematology.
“It’s a whole new source for drugs, and the pharmaceutical companies are very excited about this,” says Jan Tuttleman, Huya’s vice president of marketing. “It’s like a whole new oil field that we’ve found.”
The company has a multi-faceted strategy for capitalizing on this drug-development gusher. Huya plans to in-license some prospective drugs from China and bring
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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