STAT Newsmaker: Chi-Med's Christian Hogg

This is part of an occasional series of brief Q&As with pharma newsmakers in China. This week we talked with Christian Hogg, CEO of Hutchison China MediTech, also known as Chi-Med. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about your company.

Chi-Med is a biotech company focused primarily on oncology. It is one of the first biotech companies to become established in China. We have spent the last 20 years building a discovery and clinical development organization, and now a manufacturing organization, focused mainly on small molecules and developing cancer therapies.

You were Chi-Med's first employee back in 2000. What do you remember about the beginning?

When we started out, the idea was to modernize and globalize traditional Chinese medicine. We worked on that for the first five years. During that time, we started to focus on innovation because I felt that if we were going to modernize traditional Chinese medicine, we needed to have a research base and a science base to do that. I started hiring scientists from North America to come back to Asia to look into the science behind Chinese medicine. In 2005, when we hired our CSO, Weiguo Su, we decided to go heavily into small molecules and diverged from traditional Chinese medicine.

What does your pipeline look like?

Our most valuable asset that is furthest along globally is savolitinib, a selective c-Met inhibitor. c-Met is a genetic driver of cancer cell proliferation in many different solid tumor settings. Savolitinib inhibits this protein, essentially shutting down cancer cell proliferation. We partnered with AstraZeneca in late 2011 to develop savolitinib.

For our second drug, fruquintinib, we partnered with Eli Lilly. This VEGFR inhibitor shuts off blood flow to the tumor, essentially stopping angiogenesis. Fruquintinib has few side effects and is well-suited for combinations, so we're working with PD-1 antibody manufacturers to combine it with sintilimab from Innovent, and genolimzumab from Genor.

Our third program is surufatinib, which downregulates the production of tumor-associated macrophages, allowing T cells to come in and kill the cancer cell. Surufatinib is our first unpartnered drug. We hope to launch it this year.

Will you form other partnerships in the future?

I don't think we will partner again in China, and will instead bring our assets to market ourselves. We have the commercial infrastructure and the know-how to do that. Outside of China, if the right partners emerge that we feel can maximize the potential of our assets as they get approved, then we'll consider it. But if we feel we want to bring those assets to market ourselves, then we'll build commercial teams to do that.

How has the Covid-19 outbreak affected Chi-Med?

The first two weeks of February was a period of adaptation and improvisation, trying to figure out in a lockdown environment how to keep the business running. I think we were successful in improvising on the commercial business, which has not been too badly affected by Covid-19.

On the innovation side, running clinical trials has been a challenge because patients can't get to hospitals. We had to improvise: delivering drugs to patients in their homes, and having them interact with their physicians by video or telephone. Where we did get hurt is new patient enrollment into clinical studies. That definitely slowed down, almost to a halt. But came back quickly in March.

On the regulatory side, we submitted an NDA at the end of 2019 to the National Medical Products Administration [China's FDA] and are about to submit another in May for savolitinib, so we are in constant dialogue with the regulatory authorities in China. I am so impressed by them: they have not missed a beat over this two-month period.

This year is your 20th year with Chi-Med. Can you share a memorable moment you've had in the last two decades?

The most memorable moment was the day we got positive Phase 3 data for fruquintinib in colorectal cancer in March 2017. That came after 17 years of coming to work every day, convincing people to give us money, and investing in a dream. When that readout was positive, I was genuinely touched. Up until that point, it was all mostly hope, but the positive results made it all worthwhile.