Pharma's Chinese Takeout

KAILERA jumped the weight loss miracle-drug line by licensing four clinical-stage obesity therapies from China, which is quickly emerging as a powerhouse pharmaceutical R&D center. After all, why spend millions trying to develop novel medications in the U.S. when Chinese firms have probably already done it for you?

- Amy Feldman

In the summer of 2023, Dr. Amir Zamani, a 42-year-old Johns Hopkins-trained physician who is a partner on Bain Capital's life sciences team in Boston, was obsessed with obesity drugs. Ozempic, the blockbuster injectable for type 2 diabetes from Novo Nordisk, was taking America by storm, on pace to generate some $14 billion in revenue that year for the Danish pharmaceutical giant.

Eli Lilly was nearing FDA approval for its similar weight loss drug, Zepbound. Zamani eagerly wanted to find a competitor. He'd been reading the early research for two years and spent months digging through reams of data from dozens of companies. Then he struck gold in an unexpected place: the portfolio of Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, one of China’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.

Showcased in the early clinical data before him was a potential next-generation injectable weight loss therapy that, like Ozempic and Zepbound, targeted the blood sugar and appetite-regulating hormone GLP-1. “It was like, ‘Wait a second, they're ahead of everybody else who's not Novo or Lilly,’” he says.

Results from Phase II clinical trials in China ultimately showed 59% of participants lost 20% or more of their body weight on an eight-milligram dose of the drug in 36 weeks, and side effects were mild. If those results hold, the drug could be especially useful for severely obese patients who need to lose more weight than they can on currently available medications.

Better yet, it was available to license. “We said, ‘Gosh, this looks like it’s really a best-in-class therapy,’” Zamani recalls, noting that the portfolio also included three other drugs, two of them more easily administered pills. “Then we got very serious.”