Name: Eastworld Spotlight: Next steps for China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate
Uploaded: 2020-07-02
Duration: 7 min 37 s
Description: Qiming Venture Partners’ Gary Rieschel discusses the path forward for CanSino Biologics' vaccine.

 [MUSIC PLAYING] - Gary Rochelle is the founding partner of [INAUDIBLE] Venture, a firm he launched in Shanghai in 2006. [INAUDIBLE] has over $5 billion in assets under management, portfolio companies include [INAUDIBLE] into being one of the world's leading health venture capitalists. CanSino is one of your firms and they have just received clearance from Beijing to proceed to the next step of testing for their vaccine. What can you tell us about what's next for CanSino? - So I think the key with CanSino was the Chinese government approached them in January and said, we would like your help on working on this. And there was a precedent for that, because they worked with the Chinese government to develop an Ebola vaccine several years ago. So they had a very good reputation, very good relationships within the medical infrastructure in China. And so what I've been a little bit frustrated with is this idea that there's a race between China and the US to develop a vaccine. And maybe in some circles, there is. But the real key thing is you want multiple shots on goal on this, because there's not going to be one vaccine. It is going to be ideal for everybody. And there's risk in literally every single vaccine. I think that what you're seeing with CanSino is having done Ebola, having done COVID, they clearly have a platform and an approach that can handle multiple different viral families in terms of looking at vaccines. So I think over the last five or 10 years in the pharmaceutical industry, there has not been a great deal of attention paid to vaccines. Because even with Ebola, the number of cases was so small it was hard to build a multibillion-dollar business out of that. So vaccines were really kind of a niche. I think what you're going to see now is a serious rethinking of that, because all it takes is one example of COVID with millions of cases and potentially hundreds of millions of vaccinations every year to have that be more of not only a need of humanity, but also maybe a more profitable business. We are in the very early stages with COVID, or this coronavirus, woth understanding which vaccine will be most effective for which patient population. So I think you're going to have multiple companies in the market for an extended period of time. We may very well wind up needing to have a yearly COVID vaccine. - That's really interesting. You know, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors have long been the two areas where people have said that China really is unlikely to be able to innovate and catch up with the West? Do you see that as kind of an outmoded view of the pharma sector? - I would suggest that anyone who's ever competed with Chinese entrepreneurs probably has many stories on how they underestimated what they're capable of doing. So you have to realize-- so back before 2005, I think it was either 2004 or 2005, there was exactly one novel compound approved in China in the pharmaceutical industry. Last year there were several hundred. And in semiconductors you had a couple, 10-20, investments being made at some scale back in 2009 and '10. Last year you had 216. I would say what we feel internally, now it's the state of the art in China's semiconductor industry is not as advanced, or in pharmaceuticals is still not as advanced, as the US. But the strides it's made in catch-up in the last 10 years are extraordinary. So they were 15 years behind 10 years ago. Now they are three years behind. - The number of cases is really spiked up dramatically recently in the United States again, leading many people to worry that there really is no prospect of flattening the curve through social distancing and other kinds of measures, that the only solution for us is to have a vaccine. What's your outlook on how far away we are from having a vaccine or multiple vaccines that are ready to actually return us to something that's a little bit closer to normal? - Well so there are vaccines being available for a small group of people. So CanSino's vaccine going into the PLA trials in China, huge step forward. So I think they'll be advanced human trials in the fall. So I think the earliest that you're going to see volumes of vaccine that would be able to deal with populations like where people in Hong Kong can generally have it available, that's probably not till next spring. A significant percentage of the vaccine capacity in the world is in China. A fair amount in India. So those two countries have a pretty large ability to manufacture vaccines at scale. So I think that can ramp up relatively quickly. The interesting thing in China will be can CanSino find other places that would license and enter into business relationships to the manufacture? If it's left to just doing everything itself, I think that'll maybe be a challenge for it to scale that quickly. That's one of the things I've seen in the US that I'm actually very happy about, where Pfizer is willing to let another company use its manufacturing capacity, because they don't have an internal program that's going to be there on time. So they're going to let someone else. J&J appears to be doing the same thing. That type of collaboration needs to be applauded. That's extremely unusual to see that. - You have any thought as to how much cross-border sharing there is going to be in the different vaccines as they're developed? - I think-- Well, this will depend largely on what the fall looks like with the virus. If the next-- right now the US really never got rid of the first wave, so it's kind of hard to talk about a second wave. But let's say the US trends down and Brazil, India start to trend down by the fall, if you have that situation, then I think you'll get a relatively broad distribution of the vaccine. - [INAUDIBLE] US-China investment landscape. What does it look like on the venture funding side? Do we see a lot less activity? - So activity is down. But I think they just published some numbers that the first half of the year, they're saying it's down significantly from last year. The Chinese Venture Capital Community, yes, it's a little muted from where it was, but it's still pretty active. I mean we're on pace to do 25 to 30 investments this year. And that's a very healthy number of investments-- not the peak, but a very healthy number of investments. One of the interesting things is quite a few of our LPs have talked to us in the last year. Every single one of their investment committees, every single one of their boards is asking the question, should we still be as aggressive in investing in China? There's more uncertainty. So it's a question to be asked. But so far in our LP base, we've not had anyone pull out because they're not doing China anymore. - Fascinating perspective. Gary, it's always wonderful to talk with you. And thank you for taking the time to share your insights today. - Thanks for giving me the opportunity. 

Eastworld Spotlight: Next steps for China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate

International

CanSino Biologics is developing the vaccine.

Next steps for China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine

Qiming Venture Partners’ Gary Rieschel discusses the path forward for CanSino Biologics' vaccine.