China’s WuXi, a Partner of San Diego’s TargeGen, Offers New Model for Drug Development

the Chinese CRO, and Soll says WuXi’s work was limited to fee-for-service projects of well-defined scope. Yet WuXi’s scientists, many of whom had previous experience in U.S. research laboratories, were eager to expand their responsibilities. Over time, TargeGen has asked WuXi to help identify and analyze compound libraries using X-ray crystallography and computer modeling, supply intermediate compounds for drug development in accordance with U.S. good manufacturing practices, and use its FDA-approved laboratory facilities to measure drug concentrations from clinical trial blood samples.

“WuXi has gone from 12 employees to almost 3,000,” in less than a decade, said TargeGen co-founder and CEO Peter Ulrich. WuXi has focused its business on pre-clinical research services, but as Ulrich puts it, “Now they are a one-stop shopping center for clinical trials, medicinal chemistry studies, primate studies, you name it.” WuXi went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2007 (NYSE: [[ticker:WX]]), and acquired Minnesota-based AppTec Laboratory Services, which provides contract research and testing services, in a 2008 deal valued at nearly $163 million. (Last month, Fast Company magazine ranked WuXi at No. 8 in its list of the top 50 fastest growing global companies.)

Ulrich emphasized that TargeGen didn’t go to WuXi “from the perspective of low-cost outsourcing.” Instead, the relationship has grown so deep that he now thinks of WuXi “as an extension of our own chemistry group.” By 2005, TargeGen and WuXi were working together “in a very synergistic fashion,” said Soll. “I was running with a chemistry group of about eight people. I supplemented that with another seven or eight people at WuXi, and we were only spending $1 million a year.”

For Ulrich and Royston, the key benefit was speed. “The drug that just completed Phase II clinical trials went from nothing more than an idea to everything needed to begin clinical trials in less than 18 months,” Royston said. “I consider that phenomenal.”

The potential for drug development really became

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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.