"Bringing a drug to market successfully goes beyond proving its efficacy in treating a particular disease"

Kyowa Kirin, a Japan-based Global Specialty Pharmaceutical Company has been expanding its pipeline in rare diseases, with a focus on endocrinology and paediatrics. In 2020, the company launched a corporate venture capital firm to invest in early-stage companies, particularly for research and development (R&D) platforms that complement their own research and will hopefully lead to future product development. Dr Tan Boon Heon, President, Kyowa Kirin Asia Pacific, highlights the company’s tech-driven innovation approach, emerging trends in the pharma industry and the increasingly stringent regulatory landscape. Edited excerpts:

- Ayesha Siddiqui

What are some of your key areas of focus in R&D and what’s your approach toward pharma innovation? 

Kyowa Kirin practises what we call ‘technology-driven drug discovery’, with a specific focus on next-generation therapeutic antibodies, rational design for small molecule drugs, nucleic acid drugs and regenerative medicine.

However, we do not limit our product candidates to only those from our laboratories. We believe in the power of open innovation, and just last year, we started a corporate venture capital firm, which is investing in early-stage companies, particularly for R&D platforms that can complement our own research and will hopefully lead to products in the future that will become part of our business development strategy. This approach helps build capabilities.

Bringing a drug to market successfully goes beyond proving a drug’s efficacy in treating a particular disease; we also need to leverage upon information on how much better the drug is compared to those used in the current standard of care, how to sell the product, who is going to buy it, and how it will be paid for. Therefore, early in the development cycle, we begin to look into a potential product’s commercial viability, cost-effectiveness, and go-to-market strategy.

We do this both with our own products and those we partner with others. In particular, we specialise in nephrology and hemato-oncology areas here in Asia-Pacific and have begun to build a portfolio in rare diseases, focusing on endocrinology and paediatrics.

How do you ensure compliance with regulatory requirements while still driving innovation?