Jiang­su Hen­grui Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals has qui­et­ly be­come a top 25 bio­phar­ma com­pa­ny in the world by mar­ket val­ue.

Once vir­tu­al­ly un­known out­side of Chi­na, the com­pa­ny has made its name over­seas via an R&D en­gine that has not on­ly spawned over 20 ap­proved drugs in Chi­na, but al­so new star­tups — in­clud­ing a bil­lion-dol­lar obe­si­ty biotech — and ex­pan­sive deals with West­ern drug­mak­ers.

But there’s still one big item on its buck­et list: sell­ing its own treat­ments out­side of Chi­na. Af­ter all, it's the ca­pa­bil­i­ty to sell drugs, not just make them, that gives phar­ma com­pa­nies their stature — and prof­its.

“We have the am­bi­tion one day to have our own glob­al de­vel­op­ment ca­pa­bil­i­ties and there­fore com­mer­cial­iza­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties ex-Chi­na,” Hen­grui chief strat­e­gy of­fi­cer Frank Jiang said at End­points News’ JPM event in Jan­u­ary. In a sep­a­rate in­ter­view, he crys­tal­lized the ul­ti­mate goal: “To have Hen­grui-brand­ed prod­ucts sold in the US, the EU.”

The FDA has placed stud­ies of two gene ther­a­pies from Re­genxbio on hold af­ter a five-year-old pa­tient in one of the tri­als was found to have a brain tu­mor.

The drug reg­u­la­tor's de­ci­sion is a big blow to the Rockville, MD-based com­pa­ny, which was await­ing an FDA de­ci­sion on one of the gene ther­a­pies.

The child had re­ceived an ex­per­i­men­tal gene ther­a­py de­vel­oped by the biotech for mu­copolysac­cha­ri­do­sis (MPS) type I, a rare ge­net­ic con­di­tion that is al­so known as Hurler syn­drome. The gene ther­a­py, known as RGX-111, is ad­min­is­tered di­rect­ly to the brain.

The FDA paused the study of that gene ther­a­py, as well as a sec­ond gene ther­a­py for MPS type II, or Hunter syn­drome, Re­genxbio an­nounced Wednes­day. The FDA has a dead­line of Feb. 8 to de­cide whether to ap­prove the Hunter syn­drome pro­gram.

A biotech led by for­mer Mer­ck top brass with a pipeline an­chored by three can­cer drugs linked to Chi­nese drug de­vel­op­ers is push­ing ahead with an IPO, even while off its peak val­u­a­tion.

Eikon Ther­a­peu­tics will seek about $273.5 mil­lion in net pro­ceeds from its pro­posed Nas­daq list­ing, if in­vestors land at the mid­point of the price range the biotech is mar­ket­ing. Eikon plans to sell about 17.65 mil­lion shares be­tween $16 and $18 each and trade un­der the tick­er sym­bol EIKN, ac­cord­ing to a Wednes­day morn­ing SEC fil­ing.

The Roger Perl­mut­ter-led biotech an­tic­i­pates a val­u­a­tion as high as about $910 mil­lion, if the IPO prices at the top end of that range and lands at the ex­pect­ed 50.57 mil­lion out­stand­ing shares. That's about half of its last pri­vate val­u­a­tion of $1.85 bil­lion at the time of a $351 mil­lion Se­ries D in Feb­ru­ary 2025, ac­cord­ing to VC da­ta firm Pitch­Book. A pri­vate fund­ing round in 2023 had pegged it even high­er, at $3.64 bil­lion.