Meanwhile, in Hong Kong

It has been nearly a year since the Hong Kong Stock Exchange changed its rules to allow money-losing biotech companies to go public, an effort meant to entice stateside companies to ditch the Nasdaq and list their shares there.

How’s it going? “Bid to Lure Biotech Listings From U.S. Falls Flat,” reads this Wall Street Journal headline, and the text below points out that not a single American company has taken Hong Kong up on its offer. Only six domestic biotechs have gone public in Hong Kong since last April, and the results have been mixed.

But it’s early days yet to call the experiment a failure. Leaders of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange have described their biotech evolution as a tiered process. As exchange Senior Vice President Michael Chan told STAT in September, the first step is building a market for local biotech and then using that to attract foreign interest.