China to West: Deals Shaping the Immuno-Oncology Landscape

Frank Fekete is a Managing Director  at Centerview on the healthcare team in the New York office. He has over a decade of experience providing advice to boards and senior management teams regarding strategic initiatives including mergers and acquisitions, private and public financings, and other corporate processes totaling more than $75 billion in value across developed and emerging markets.  Select recent M&A experience includes: Merck’s $11.5bn acquisition of Acceleron, Cerevel’s $8.7bn sale to AbbVie, Chinook’s sale to Novartis for up to $3.5bn, Viela’s sale to Horizon Therapeutics for $3.1bn, EyeBio’s sale to Merck for up to $3.0bn and Ambrx’s sale to JnJ for $2.0bn. Select recent China M&A includes: Gracell’s sale to AstraZeneca, Proteologix’s sale to JNJ, Curon’s CD3xCD19 asset sale to Merck, and Lian Bio’s sale of Mavacamten rights to Bristol Myers. Additionally, Mr Fekete has advised on some of the largest financings in the industry raising capital for innovative biopharmas including: Allogene, Cerevel, Intellia, Juno, Sana, SpringWorks and uniQure. Prior to joining Centerview, Mr Feket was a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in the Healthcare group. He received an MS in Physiology and Biophysics from Georgetown’s School of Medicine and a BA from Villanova University’s Honors College. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, daughter and labrador retriever.

Nikolaos “Nick” George, PhD has more than 30 years of experience developing and evaluating biologics-based patent portfolios.Dr George has devised worldwide patent prosecution strategies for dozens of pre-clinical, clinical, and approved products involving such diverse technologies as therapeutic antibodies, antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), cellular therapeutics (including natural killer [NK], macrophage, monocyte, regulatory T [Treg] cell, and induced pluripotent stem cell [iPSC] therapeutics), gene therapies, gene editing, oncolytic viruses, RNA (ribonucleic acid) therapeutics, peptide therapeutics, diagnostics, and enzyme replacements.Dr George also routinely conducts freedom-to-operate, noninfringement, invalidity, and patentability assessments and performs IP diligence in connection with investments, partnerships, licensing, and private and public financings.He advises clients ranging from emerging company start-ups to mid- and large-cap biotech and pharmaceutical companies, as well as life sciences venture capital and incubator firms.Dr George holds a PhD in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley and prior to entering patent law did postdoc research at Columbia University (The Chalfie Lab).

Grace Han McMahon, MBA, JD serves as Associate Vice President and Head of Merck’s BD&L Pacific Innovation Hub which encompasses the North American West Coast and Asia Pacific. Her team is responsible for structuring and negotiating partnerships with companies that offer differentiated early-stage therapeutic opportunities. Ms Han McMahon re-joined Merck after five years at Genentech where she led a team of transactional attorneys and negotiated collaboration, licensing, M&A and manufacturing transactions. Prior to Genentech, Ms Han McMahon was an in-house lawyer at Merck headquarters for ten years where she was the lead attorney on numerous early-stage, clinical and commercial transactions with biotech and biopharma companies in the US, Europe, Japan, China, India and southeast Asia. In addition, Grace has experience working in Europe where she helped launch US internet companies and prior to that, in New York City where she represented biotech and high technology companies as a law firm associate for Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. Ms Han McMahon holds a MBA from INSEAD in France and Singapore, a JD from New York University School of Law and a BA from the University of Virginia.

Cindy Xiong, PhD, joined Foresite Capital in 2019 as a member of the investment team, focusing on evaluating investment opportunities of private and public biotech companies. Dr Xiong serves on the boards of ImmPACT Bio (board director), Raythera (board observer), Remix Therapeutics (board observer) and Xinthera (board observer, acquired by Gilead).Prior to Foresite, Dr Xiong earned her MBA in Healthcare Management from the Wharton school. During her time at Wharton, she interned at Lilly Asia Ventures and was a summer analyst at Tybourne Capital. Dr Xiong received her PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied neural regeneration and degeneration post axonal injury. After that, she was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with Dr Wendell Lim at UCSF, developing new technologies for genome and cell engineering. She then joined Agenovir as the first scientist, where she led a team to develop CRISPR based therapeutics for HPV induced cancers.

Leon ‘Jun’ Tang, PhD, is the founding partner of InScienceWeTrust BioAdvisory, a business development company focused on the US/APAC cross-border partnerships in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr Tang is also the founder of InScienceWeTrust Community, which has more than 2,000 members from the Asian biotech community. Dr Tang serves as a scientific advisor to Mianus Capital, a boutique US-based healthcare PE/VC fund currently focused on ophthalmology. He is also an advisor to BioSpark, an Asian biotech professional’s association based in Massachusetts. Previously, Dr Tang was a senior director of BD Search & Evaluation at Shanghai Henlius Biotech, a public biotech listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a biotech sell-side analyst at Barclays Investment Bank and a senior manager/senior analyst at the philanthropic venture fund of Cancer Research Institute of New York. Dr Tang has published 50+ academic papers, some of which are in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Lancet Oncology, Science Translational Medicine, Nature Communications, Science Advances, PNAS, etc. Dr Tang received his bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, master’s degree from Nankai University, PhD from Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai and postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Axel Hoos, MD, PhD, was most recently the CEO of Scorpion Therapeutics. Prior to this, Dr Hoos was Senior Vice President and Therapeutic Area Head, Oncology R&D at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals (GSK).As leader of the Oncology TA he oversaw both its discovery and development functions and built the Oncology portfolio of GSK across several modalities including antibodies, small molecules, bispecific molecules and cell & gene therapies. The TA’s scientific focus is on Immuno-Oncology, Epigenetics and Cell Therapy. Dr Hoos also served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the HIV Cure Center, a co-venture of GSK and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Dr Hoos further serves as Executive Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Sabin Vaccine Institute (SVI), a Global Health organization, Non-executive Director on the Board of Imugene, a biotech company, Co-Chairman of the Cancer Immunotherapy Consortium (CIC) and Scientific Advisory Board Member of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI). He further is a Scientific Advisory Group member at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), and Industry Co-Chair of the Partnership for Acceleration Cancer Therapies (PACT) of the US Cancer Moonshot.His efforts in Medicines Development and Global Health focus on novel and transformational therapies for life-threatening diseases, scientific and procedural innovation, and broad collaboration across multiple constituents to solve complex health problems. Through his leadership, a new paradigm for the development of cancer immunotherapies has been defined, which helped launch the field of Immuno-Oncology.Previously, Dr Hoos was the Global Medical Lead in Immunology/Oncology at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) where he developed Yervoy (Ipilimumab), the first life-extending therapy in Immuno-Oncology. Before BMS, Dr Hoos was Senior Director of Clinical Development at Agenus Bio (previously Antigenics), a biotech company.Dr Hoos holds an MD from Ruprecht-Karls-University and a PhD in molecular oncology from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) both in Heidelberg, Germany. He trained in surgery at the Technical University in Munich, Germany and further in surgery, molecular pathology and tumor immunology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He is an alumnus of the Program for Leadership Development at Harvard Business School.