THE CITY OF Hopewell, NEW JERSEY, was caught off guard in 2016 when longtime resident Bristol-Myers Squibb announced plans to vacate a 1. 1 million-square-foot production and studio facility, eliminating more than 1,100 jobs and $6 million in taxes annually. As of 2019, Hopewell attracted 3 US-based biotech startups. In the U. S. : PTC Therapeutics that year, PassageBio in 2020, and Genoa Bio in 2021, but it has not yet filled the entire vacant slot.
In the end, it scored great success with a little-known, cancer-focused newcomer in 2021: BeiGene, which agreed to buy a third of the area in a park now called the “Princeton West Innovation Campus. “Led by entrepreneur John Oyler, a 56-year-old American with extensive experience in Greater China and who now lives in the United States, BeiGene agreed to invest $800 million, one of the largest pharmaceutical projects in New Jersey in recent years.
One of New Jersey’s charms: It’s home to some of the largest providers of cancer drugs in the United States, besides Johnson
“There is a tremendous amount of talent,” CEO John Oyler told Forbes in a Zoom interview from California. BeiGene chose Hopewell, west of central New Jersey, after reviewing more than 160 other sites through 2020.
Now, three years after the signing of the agreement and two years after New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy presided over the groundbreaking, the new BeiGene facility opens its doors on Wednesday, July 23. Hopewell’s investment is part of an ongoing foreign initiative through BeiGene, which has a market capitalization of $16 billion. The company already has 10,000 employees in 40 countries. It might take an entire village to raise a child, but the fight against cancer requires massive global collaboration,” Oyler said. about to grow in the coming years. BeiGene’s philosophy is shown on its website: “Cancer has no borders. Neither do we. ” The market for cancer drugs reached $155. 7 billion in 2022 but is expected to reach $272 billion by 2030, according to forecasts by Precedence Research.
Oyler has staked his fortune on the fight against cancer. BeiGene’s largest individual shareholder, Oyler’s net worth peaked at $1. 8 billion in 2021. It is now worth $1 billion as investors expect BeiGene to generate steady profits. The New Jersey production facility: which will increase its existing capacity in China and outsourced production, will give it more room to meet U. S. demand for its pipeline of cancer drugs, but until the company makes steady money, investors could face a bumpy road.
OYLER credits his interest in science to an instructor at Mount Lebanon High School in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I was lucky to have attended a top-tier public school with a progressive perspective that allowed you to take electives,” she said. Inspirational educator Ada Hutchison died at the age of 94 in 2018. “You can design experiments and do them, and she’ll give you advice,” Oyler said. “It hooked me on science for life and I enjoyed learning. “Training”
The economic decline of the American metallurgical center in the 1970s and 1980s made the young Oyler appreciate entrepreneurship. “It wasn’t a good time to be a parent in Pittsburgh or work in Pittsburgh because the industry was collapsing,” the 56-year-old recalls. “It was a smart time to be a native kid because sports groups were doing well, (but) a lot of other people were wasting their jobs. The first 3 friends I made moved away because their father lost his job. His conclusion: “If you can create clever paintings, it’s magical. I don’t forget to lie in bed and dream: Can’t you just have a business where you have all those friends, no family stress and move away? »
Oyler’s interest in science helped him get into MIT; his time in the Boston domain also combined it with entrepreneurship. “I made it and I needed to work. I come from a circle of relatives who were not in debt, were not wealthy and were afraid of going into debt at some point. “MIT,” Oyler recalls. So I worked at the coffee stand in the morning promoting the coffee and I worked at the tennis bubble sweeping the court. “
“Finally, a friend said to me, ‘Why don’t we do business together?’ We started business activities to pay for our studies, which consisted of promoting things that academics needed throughout Boston, in about thirteen universities. We sold rugs, shelves and flowers, anything. Actually, it was a success. We made a lot of money and we learned a lot. . All the demanding situations you can believe: other people steal what works for you,” he said. “It was a brilliant learning experience. Then I made the decision at school and wanted to become an entrepreneur. That’s what I wanted to do. I still enjoyed science. “
After earning an engineering degree from MIT, Oyler joined McKinsey in Washington, D. C. , but was curious about racing abroad. The consulting firm presented him with paintings in Hong Kong, Buenos Aires or Sydney. He says that his boss at the time encouraged him to decide on Hong Kong by spreading the rumor that he did not have the courage to go to Asia. “The guy absolutely manipulated me,” Oyler said. I didn’t have any specific interest in Hong Kong, but I don’t let anyone say I didn’t have the courage. The next thing I know, I’m on a plane to Hong Kong, on a flight that would replace his life.
Oyler witnessed first-hand the difficulties of the early days of the Chinese market reform and its enormous potential. He then returned to the United States and enrolled in an MBA program at Stanford. Endowed with a new vision for business, he created and then sold two corporations in the United States and China. Telephia, a client telecommunications research company founded by Oyler in 1997, was sold to The Nielsen Co. for $449 million in 2007. La next big fortune came with the discovery outsourcing company. BioDuro drugs, which he founded in 2005 and sold to PPD Inc. BioDuro was especially important, he said, because it looked at how many small biotech corporations are underfunded and easily fail.
Flush with money from sales, he spoke to a professional at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York for advice on developing cancer drugs; He also discussed his concept with Xiaodong Wang, a professor at China’s Tsinghua University, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher.
Wang co-founded BeiGene with Oyler, who invested $10 million of his own cash and came on board through some angel investors, as well as an investment from Merck to put cash up front. Baker Brothers Advisors, the American investment company whose executives Julian and Felix Baker are each worth $2. 8 billion and became investors in October 2014.
According to its 2018 Hong Kong board prospectus, it “started as a research and development company in Beijing in 2010, focusing on creating best-in-class oncology treatments. ” Now, with Oyler’s return to the United States, the company needs to distance itself from its Chinese roots. BeiGene “was not incorporated in China and has never been based in China,” spokesman Kyle Blankenship said, adding that the wording “does not mean we were founded in China. ” The company is “incorporated in the Cayman Islands and BeiGene has never had an official headquarters in China or anywhere else. “
BeiGene CEO John Oyler poses for a photo after the company’s board rite at the Hong Kong Array Stock Exchange. [+] Kong Stock Exchange in 2018. Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg
There is no doubt that China is excited because of its size, emerging income, and the number of cancer patients. “We may see the adjustments coming from regulators — that China would start investing in state-of-the-art drugs, conducting trials and recruiting patients and we were thinking about how that would work,” Oyler said. In addition, he said, “we learned that we needed to open many more clinical centers around the world to reduce prices. replace the charge structure. Split the initial prices among a much larger number of patients, and you get a virtuous cycle that diminishes everything again and again. So our initial hypothesis.
BeiGene gained momentum when it went public on Nasdaq in 2016; it was then indexed in Hong Kong in 2018. A year later, it gained backing from US cancer drug giant Amgen, which paid $2. 7 billion for a 20. 5% stake at $174. 85 a share, a premium of 36% of its percentage value at that time. BeiGene made money from the newly issued stakes, but also from a portfolio of anti-cancer drugs to distribute and co-develop with Amgen in China, now the world’s second-largest pharmaceutical market.
BeiGene’s interest in expanding into the United States and New Jersey led the city of Hopewell to think more deeply about China’s good fortune in attracting manufacturers. “During the structure planning process, we evaluated the importance of speed of approvals and structure for BeiGene by using the example of how Tesla temporarily built its new factory in China,” said former Mayor Kevin Kuchinski, who worked with BeiGene in the future. to his city of about 2,000 inhabitants.
“We made a conscious decision to build on the existing strong asset base, adding the former small-scale biologics production plant (Bristol-Myers Squibb), an on-site stand-alone water treatment plant and central utilities. Like also tends to attract like,” Kuchinski said, referring to the two companies’ joint business activities. Local, county and state agencies “cut red tape” to speed up the project.
Of course, New Jersey is absolutely new territory for BeiGene. Eight drug trials are already underway in New Jersey. This year four more are planned, spread over 12 sites. He hopes to increase that overall once the new investment is made, a move that will also provide advantages to cancer centers in the New Jersey network by generating more profits and business for them, Oyler said. The company also has a 120-person sales office in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, which opened in August 2018 (it also has offices in Fulton, Maryland; San Mateo and Emeryville, California and Cambridge, Massachusetts).
BeiGene’s biggest smart fortune to date has been its Brukinsa and tislelizumab drugs, as well as profits from Amgem’s licensed products and production collaboration with Novartis. Brukinsa’s sales benefited from U. S. regulatory approval. The U. S. Department of Agriculture and Drug Administration (CDC) has been widely used as a remedy for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia and small lymphocytic lymphoma and received good reviews for its arrival in blood cancer treatments. In total, those flows helped generate profits by 68% to $751 million in the first quarter of 2024; Its net loss fell to $251 million in the same period, from $348 million a year earlier.
BeiGene’s prospects in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic were better than many corporations because of the geographic dispersion of its operations, said Oyler, who grew up in Pittsburgh, where he was a big hockey fan. He returned to the United States during the pandemic. Today, he believes, the company is halfway to its growth goals and has a much larger global component in which to grow. “I have a very itinerant life,” dividing my time on the east and west coasts of the United States. , as well as in Asia and Europe, he said. It’s the nature of supporting a company that is expanding globally,” he added.
“We’ve built this global team. When you have a primary workplace where everyone goes to one physical location, by definition everyone else is a second-class citizen who isn’t in that location in your company because they’re outside the business. ” from the beginning to build an organization that embraced remote paints and remote teams for a leadership team that could be distributed around the world,” he said.
“If you want to create affordable drugs to fight cancer, by definition you have to be global. You have to be global for your clinical trials, otherwise they will charge you too much. You want to be global when creating a marketplace because the vast majority of payment is made upfront. If you don’t market your product worldwide, you may not be able to amortize the charge to enough patients,” Oyler said. “I think the tech industry has been operating in a much more distributed way for years. Its demanding situations are less difficult: it is not as complex as our industry. It is much more difficult, with much more transversal knowledge, to create a drug than software. As with software products, the anticipated prices for drugs are enormous, he said. As for BeiGene’s financials, China Merchants Securities (HK) estimates that BeiGene will have $2. 5 billion in liquidity by the end of 2024. Revenue will increase from $2. 4 billion in 2023 to $4 billion in 2025; its expected loss for that entire era will fall from $882 million to $383 million, the brokerage said.
What about the complex politics between the United States and China? “There certainly hasn’t been any direct impact on our operations,” she said. “One of the wonderful things about fighting cancer is that it is something that everyone seeks to do and that everyone sympathizes with, despite all the noise” in foreign affairs. Regarding the BIOSECURE Act pending in the US Congress that would prevent federal money intended for biotech devices or facilities from going to certain Chinese entities and corporations under the control of a “foreign adversary,” BeiGene said it “does not comply with any of the criteria.
Someone else who is positive about BeiGene is Hopewell’s Kuchinski. He expects BeiGene to contribute as much tax benefit to the city through 2031 from its 42 acres as Bristol-Myers Squibb’s larger campus did several years ago.
This success, if achieved, would mark a completed project across both.
See similar articles:
Top 10 Richest Chinese Billionaires 2024
‘Fundamentally false’: Less than 5% of cancer patients have to undergo clinical trials
Meet the scientist coordinating Joe Biden’s new trip to the moon
@rflannerychina