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Founder of Hua Medicine Dr. Li CHEN was awarded the "C.C. Tan Life Science Industrialization Award"
The 17th "C.C. Tan Life Science Award" ceremony was held in Shenyang, China, on October 9th. Dr. Li CHEN, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hua Medicine, was awarded the “C.C. Tan Life Science Industrialization Award”. C.C. Tan Life Science Award has the highest honor known as “the Chinese Nobel” in life science.
"C.C. Tan Life Science Award" was proposed by Mr. Jiazhen TAN, one of the founders of modern genetics in China and an outstanding scientist and educator in modern China. This award is a high recognition of Dr. Chen's outstanding contributions to the industrialization of life science achievements, and a full affirmation of his decades-long efforts in Chinese biopharmaceutical industry.
With more than 30 years of experience in new drug R&D and management, Dr. Chen returned to Shanghai from the U.S. in 2004, and participated in the establishment of Roche China R&D Center, the first R&D center of a multinational company in Shanghai, bringing the advanced experience, talent concept, technical standards and quality management system of international new drug R&D to China, and contributing to the establishment of the environment of China's biopharmaceutical industry.
In 2010, Dr. Chen founded Hua Medicine in Shanghai, focusing on the unmet clinical needs, and concentrating on the research and development of first-in-class new medicines for diabetes. Dr. Chen is not only one of the earliest pioneers to leave his executive position at a multinational pharmaceutical company to start a local innovative drug company, but also a leader in developing first-in-class drugs in China.
Under the leadership of Dr. Chen, Hua Medicine's globally first-in-class new drug, dorzagliatin (Trade name: HuaTangNing (华堂宁®)), which took ten years to develop independently, was approved by the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) of China in September 2022. HuaTangNing is the first Glucokinase Activator (GKA) approved and marketed globally, and is also recognized as the tenth class of diabetes therapeutic drugs. HuaTangNing was included in China's National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) by the National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) on December, 2023. Cooperating with its commercial partner, Bayer Healthcare Company Limited, a leading global pharmaceutical company, the revenue of HuaTangNing has reached nearly ￥200 million.
As the world's first GKA drug, HuaTangNing utilizes the original concept of "repairing the sensor, restoring homeostasis, and treating the underlying cause of diabetes" to achieve the aims at directly addressing the root cause of the failure of blood glucose sensors in T2D patients, and to bring a brand-new treatment for patients, which is a major breakthrough in the history of drug research and development of China in the field of major chronic diseases.
The R&D history of developing GKA can be traced back to the 1960s. The father of Glucokinase (GK), world famous Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Dr. Franz Matschinsky discovered that GK could sense glucose level changes in the β-cell, and regulate glucose metabolism according to changes in glucose levels. The research increased the understanding of the relationship between β-cell function and early phase insulin secretion in healthy people and diabetes patients. Under his initiative, a few multinational pharmaceutical companies started the development of GKA. But all their efforts failed because of different reasons.
Until the approval of HuaTangNing, Dr. Franz Matschinsky's theory was finally translated into the world's first GKA new drug. As a senior scientific consultant of the company, Hua Medicine has a long history of cooperation with Dr. Matschinsky, the cooperation between them emphasized the core role of GK in the regulation of glucose homeostasis, which improved the understanding of the pathogenesis of diabetes and opened a whole new realm for the development of diabetes drugs and its clinical application.
In 2020，Dr. Matschinsky was awarded the Rolf Luft Award, "Nobel Prize" for endocrinology and metabolism, because of his discovery that glucokinase (GK) is the sensor controlling glucose-stimulated insulin secretion in the pancreatic β-cell". He was also awarded for promoting the progress of pharmaceutical industry to discover GKA and entered into phase III. At that time, Hua Medicine, led by Dr. Chen was the only company to advance clinical trials to Phase III.
In addition to contributions to the scientific community, during the development of Hua Medicine, Dr. Chen has actively contributed to the development of China's biopharmaceutical industry. He has provided constructive opinions and suggestions for the system of Marketing Authorization Holder (MAH) and patent linkage and patent protection, etc. He has cooperated with enterprises in the industry chain in the R&D and production of HuaTangNing to establish a joint innovation model, which has led to the development of the ecological development of the biopharmaceutical industry.
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