Bio Burst

Lou Jing’s drugmaker has gotten a big foothold in China and wants future breakthroughs to be global.

- Jane ho

It’s much more comfortable without the tie,” says Lou Jing (55) after posing for a photographer. “I still haven’t got used to it.” The chairman and CEO of 3SBio, one of China’s largest biopharma firms, is more at ease in just his lab coat.

No wonder: He headed the research of two of the company’s market leader drugs: Tpiao for low blood platelet count in oncology patients, with a 51 percent share in China, the world’s only commercialised recombinant drug of its kind, and EPO—or biotech blood-cell boosting— drug Epiao for kidney-induced anemia, with a 34 percent share.

On the backs of those two medicines, 3SBio’s revenue last year surged by a third to $553 million. Both drugs were developed at the Shenyang company’s US research centre near Washington, DC, set up by Lou in 1995 after a two-year postdoc at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.

Although 3SBio reflects a sectoral surge in China—half a dozen other Chinese drug or biotech firms join it on this year’s 200 Best Under A Billion list, and the government made the industry part of its ‘2025’ quest for world economic leadership—its success has been 25 years in the making. Lou’s father, Lou Dan, an army medic turned researcher, founded state-affiliated Shenyang Sunshine Pharmaceutical in 1993. As it soon privatised, his son’s US academic work led to the lab opening there.

Lou Jing moved the US research centre to Shenyang in 2001 and shifted his focus to finance and management when the exchange of resources between China and the US got difficult after 9/11. Having worked for over a decade with his father, he fully took over day-to-day management when Lou Dan retired in 2012. (He died this past March.)