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Pan Ruidong, reporter of Yangtze Business Daily Pentium News

Pharmaceutical giant Huadong Medicine (000963.SZ) has made another breakthrough in the licensing of its CAR-T cell products.

On the evening of August 4, Huadong Medicine announced that its wholly-owned subsidiary Huadong Medicine (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Huadong Medicine Hangzhou") and Beijing Immuno Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Immio Pharmaceutical") have signed an exclusive product commercialization cooperation agreement.

According to the agreement, Huadong Medicine Hangzhou will pay ImmunoPharma a down payment of RMB 125 million, as well as registration and sales milestone payments of no more than RMB 950 million, which will be paid after the relevant milestones are completed. The total amount will reach RMB 1.075 billion.

It is understood that IM19CAR-T cell injection is the first CAR-T cell therapy product independently developed by ImmunoPharma. It has successively obtained drug clinical trial approval notices for three indications from the National Medical Products Administration, namely relapsed and refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, acute B-lymphocytic leukemia and mantle cell lymphoma, and all have entered the registration clinical research stage.

Regarding this transaction, Huadong Medicine stated in the announcement that emerging treatment methods represented by CAR-T cell therapy are expected to fill the huge market gap and bring new hope to patients with blood cancers.

In fact, in early March this year, Huadong Medicine has exclusively commercialized a CAR-T product, Zevokyol Injection, which has been approved for marketing. This is a product introduced by Huadong Medicine from Hong Kong-listed company Coherus Pharmaceuticals. It is an autologous CAR-T candidate product targeting BCMA, used to treat adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma who have progressed after at least 3 lines of treatment (at least one proteasome inhibitor and immunomodulator have been used).

A reporter from the Yangtze Business Daily Pentium News noticed that since July, Huadong Medicine has been very active, and four contracts have been finalized, including the latest licensing introduction contract.

Looking back at the announcement, on July 19, the company reached two transactions. One is that the company's wholly-owned subsidiary Bohua Pharmaceutical plans to invest 528 million yuan to acquire 100% of Hengba Pharmaceutical's equity. The second is that the company's subsidiary Zhongmei Huadong signed a cooperative development and marketing service agreement for the QX005N product with the company's equity-holding Quanxin Bio.

Earlier on July 12, Sino-US Huadong signed an exclusive product licensing agreement with Auszone Biopharmaceuticals to introduce Idarubicin tablets. Sino-US Huadong will pay Auszone Biopharmaceuticals a down payment of RMB 100 million, development, registration and sales milestone payments of up to RMB 1.185 billion, and tiered net sales commissions of up to double digits.

In terms of performance, in the first quarter of this year, the company achieved operating income of 10.411 billion yuan, exceeding 10 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 2.93%. Data shows that Huadong Medicine has achieved quarterly revenue of over 10 billion yuan for five consecutive quarters. From the first quarter of 2023 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the revenues of the four quarters were 10.11 billion yuan, 10.27 billion yuan, 10.01 billion yuan, and 10.23 billion yuan respectively.

At the same time, the company's net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company achieved double-digit growth for three consecutive quarters. From the third quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024, the company's net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was RMB 755 million, RMB 650 million, and RMB 862 million, respectively, a year-on-year increase of 17.84%, 25.51%, and 14.18%.