Working under Zheng Li is incredibly stressful because he understands the industry so well.
The boss is the most knowledgeable person in the entire R&D field; you can't fool him about your R&D progress, difficulty, or approach.
Li Wanqing wouldn't dare to lie to Zheng Li. He reported on what he had done, what he hadn't done, and how much progress he had made, based on the actual situation.
Among them, two small molecule drugs that Kechuang Bio will conduct clinical trials this year are led by Wang Jinsong, who is considered one of the earlier R&D personnel to join the company in the field of innovative drug development.
He and Cheng Gang are alumni, but not from the same graduating class.
When Kechuang Biotech went public, it stated that it would engage in the research and development of original drugs. After the successful listing, Wang Jinsong joined Kechuang Biotech.
He had previously been at Merck, from Merck's headquarters in New Jersey to Merck's headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The reason I came to Kechuang Biotechnology is because there is almost no room for growth at Merck.
Then there's Cheng Gang on the other side of Kechuang Bio. Kechuang Bio has a very new history, abundant cash flow, and the founding team seems ambitious, with many opportunities.
After leaving Merck, Wang Jinsong joined Kechuang Biotechnology, where he was responsible for the research and development of small molecule drugs.
After joining the company, the next step is to select a research topic and then initiate a research and development project.
Wang Jinsong originally thought that Zheng Li didn't know much about the research and development of small molecule drugs.
First, we need to explain a concept: drug development is divided into many fields, mainly small molecule chemical drugs and large molecule biological drugs.
Endorphins are biological macromolecules, substances that are naturally present in living organisms. Zheng Li simply developed the manufacturing process for endorphins.
Biological macromolecules have larger molecular weights and more complex structures, with molecular weights generally ranging from 1500 to 1500.
Small molecule drugs generally have a molecular weight distribution between 200 and 700.
Historically, from the discovery of penicillin in the 1920s and 30s until 1982, all drugs in the modern medical sense were small molecule drugs.
Penicillin is also a small molecule drug.
The first truly large molecule drug was launched in 1982.
This phenomenon occurs because determining the structure of small molecules only requires 1H NMR, 1C NMR, and 1LCMS to achieve relatively good results.
However, methods for measuring macromolecular structures are often more complex.
The measurement of biomolecules requires higher precision and sensitivity than that of small molecules.
Of course, this does not mean that the development of biological macromolecules is necessarily more advanced than that of small molecule compounds.
Screening is the most important method in modern small molecule drug development.
To perform screening, first you need a sieve, second you need a warehouse with enough items for you to screen, then you need to know what these items in the warehouse are and what they look like, and finally you need to be able to mass-produce the items that you screen.
In recent years, new methods have also emerged, and Kechuang Bio's small molecule drug development adopts new technological approaches.
However, historically, especially during the booming pharmaceutical industry of the 1990s, screening methods were the mainstream approach.
A sieve is an experiment based on various disease indicators, in which small chemical molecules are placed into corresponding experiments to see which ones are effective.
The so-called library refers to a molecular library, which was developed due to the rapid advancements in organic synthesis methods in the 1970s and 1980s.
A large number of complex, stable molecules with heterocyclic structures, which were originally difficult to synthesize, began to appear in large quantities.
Advances in detection methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry have led to the successful isolation of many natural products, which in turn has promoted the synthesis of other types of molecules.
Therefore, by the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies had millions of different types of small molecules in their molecular libraries.
The development of biotechnology during this period has led to the discovery of some important disease indicators and targets.
These discoveries enabled biopharmaceutical giants to screen these diseases and targets using millions of small molecules, leading to a surge in new drugs in the 1990s.
The gap between Chinese biopharmaceutical companies and the world's pharmaceutical giants widened mainly during this period.
While others are conducting targeted analysis, China is making slow progress in this area.
One piece of data can indirectly prove this point: China began implementing new drug registration regulations in 1985.
From 1985 to 2008, a total of 23 years, China approved only 5 Class I new drugs.
Wang Jinsong first heard the name Zheng Li in Nature, when he was still at Merck headquarters.
At the time, many people inside the company were discussing how a Chinese person had figured out a laboratory method for preparing endorphins.
Wang Jinsong was amazed by the ingenious experimental design, but when he later learned that the student was a freshman and even from the School of Mathematics, he became skeptical.
Those who are experts in the field understand the difficulty of developing biological macromolecule drugs, even if the biological macromolecule is a polypeptide substance that is naturally present in living organisms.
But if a substance discovered in the 1950s were so easy to manufacture, how could it have been left for you to discover?
Wang Jinsong has seen historical documents within Merck, including those from the 1980s, where a research and development team at Merck spent two years trying to solve the problem but failed.
Later, I learned about Zheng Li when he developed an industrial-scale manufacturing method for endorphins, and when Kechuang Bio was negotiating patent licensing with major international pharmaceutical companies around endorphins.
It was only then that Wang Jinsong believed that such a genius actually existed in the world.
It's possible to buy a Nature paper, but it's impossible to get someone to hand over the industrial manufacturing method.
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