Last week, Dr. Yihan Wang, Chairman and CEO of TargetRx, was invited to attend the Nanshan Doctor Forum hosted by Nanshan District Association for Science and Technology and Nanshan Library, and undertaken by Nanshan Science and Technology Office. The theme of this forum is Developing World’s First-in-Class Novel Drugs in Shenzhen - Talking about the Development Process of the “Almighty Medicine” for Treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (For details, please click at the end of the article to read the original text: "Shekou News: Dr. Yihan Wang, founder of Shenzhen TargetRx Inc. – a Scientific Dream Chaser, is dedicated to the R&D of first-in-class drugs for leukemia).）。

The hit movie Dying to Survive in 2018 has aroused the attention of the public to CML and its patient populations. CML is the abbreviation of chronic myelocytic leukemia, which is caused by the translocation between chromosomes 9 and 22 in the patient. The incidence of CML is 1-2 per 100,000, but the age of onset in China is tending to be younger.

Dr. Yihan Wang shared to nearly a thousand audiences online the pathogenesis of CML, past treatments (interferon, bone marrow transplantation, etc.) and various generations of targeted drugs for CML represented by the “silver bullets for cancer” Gleevec.

Dr. Wang worked at Ariad Pharmaceuticals Inc. in the United States for 16 years, focusing on the R&D of new anti-cancer drugs. He is the core inventor of the only approved third-generation CML targeted drug Ponatinib (iClusig) in the world. Regrettably, panatinib has not yet been marketed in China.

Knowing that many patients in China cannot afford expensive anti-cancer drugs, Dr. Wang resolutely decided to return to China. He founded TargetRx in Shenzhen in 2014 and led a leading scientific research team to overcome the problem of cancer drug resistance and develop affordable new domestic drugs for domestic patients.

Taking TargetRx's TGRX-678 (a product under development, which obtained a clinical trial notification issued by the Center for Drug Evaluation of the National Medical Products Administration in June 2021) as an example, Dr. Wang introduced the difficulties in the development of the innovative drugs. After target confirmation, computer-aided drug design and virtual screening, and lead compound synthesis, a series of optimization steps are also required.

Shenzhen is at the forefront of China's reform and opening up. Nanshan, as a core science and technology park in Shenzhen, provides excellent overall scientific research environment. The municipal and district governments provide good conditions for entrepreneurship. Dr. Wang likes the working environment here and is also very satisfied with the government services. Dr. Wang firmly believes that a group of biopharmaceutical companies that are in the early stages of entrepreneurship like TargetRx can grow rapidly in Nanshan.

"The development of pharmaceutical industry in China is still in its infancy," said Dr. Wang. "There are more than 7,000 genetic diseases, but effective treatment options are available for only 300 such diseases." The R&D of new drugs in China still has a long way to go. Dr. Yihan Wang encourages more and more young people, even the next generation, to actively participate in the construction of the biopharmaceutical industry in China.

At the end of the forum, the audience (readers) actively raised questions about CML, targeted therapy, and restrictions on the development of the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Yihan Wang answered these questions one by one.