The Bio Report

Asia is quickly becoming a powerhouse for biopharma innovation, changing ideas about where breakthrough science and fast, cost-efficient drug development happen. A new McKinsey & Company report shows how countries like China, Japan, and India are each building their own strengths across the drug development continuum. We spoke to Fangning Zhang, a partner in McKinsey’s Shanghai office, about what’s driving this shift, how it could make innovation more affordable, and why treating Asia as optional may mean missing the next wave of global R&D.

Leukemia once threatened Aaron Viny’s life, but now it defines his mission. Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a college student, he survived chemotherapy, central nervous system relapse, and an allogeneic stem cell transplant from his younger brother—an experience that made him aware of both the power and toxicity of conventional cancer care. Today, as a hematologist-oncologist and laboratory researcher at Columbia University, Viny is helping reimagine how we treat blood cancers by shifting from blunt, cell-killing approaches to precision strategies that rewire malignant cells and their ecosystems. We spoke to Viny, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physician and Surgeons, about the case for thinking of hematological cancers as regulatory problem rather than focusing on genetic mutations, the potential for looking at epigenetic activators and deactivators of genes to treat them, and how he is harnessing new technology to look at cell-surface proteins to distinguish regenerating marrow from refractory leukemia.

When Amy Burroughs stepped in as CEO of Terns Pharmaceuticals, she not only had to fill a void created by the death of her predecessor, but also lead a strategic shift from an increasingly crowded area of metabolic disease to focus on its experimental therapy for chronic myeloid leukemia. The company’s allosteric BCR-ABL inhibitor binds to a different site on the fusion protein than most first- and second-generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors. The data have the company and its investors believing the drug can reset the bar for both efficacy and tolerability in a multibillion-dollar market. We spoke with Burroughs about reinventing the company, the decision to seek partners for non-core assets, and how she is charting a clear path toward a broader oncology future.

A One‑Two Gene Therapy Punch to Non-Muscle Invasive Bladder Cancer

Non–muscle invasive bladder cancer is a common, slow-progressing form of bladder cancer that makes up a majority of the roughly half a million new cases diagnosed each year. For decades, doctors have relied on a weakened bacterium called BCG, an intravesical immunotherapy, as a standard treatment for early-stage disease, but it fails in about 30 to 40 percent of patients. EnGene is taking a different approach with detalimogene, an experimental, non-viral gene therapy designed to trigger a powerful but localized immune response right where the cancer lives in the bladder. We spoke with Ron Cooper, CEO of EnGene, about this therapy for non–muscle invasive bladder cancer, how its dual payload is meant to activate both an innate and adaptive immune response in the bladder, and the company’s $130 million financing at the end of 2025.

One of the challenges of treating brain tumors is delivering potent biologic therapies across the blood-brain barrier. Adaptin Bio has developed platform technology that harnesses a patient’s own T cells to transport bispecific therapeutic payloads across the blood-brain barrier and into other targeted tissue with an initial focus on treating glioblastoma. We spoke to Michael Roberts, co-founder and CEO of Adaptin Bio, about the unmet need in glioblastoma, the limitations of current blood-brain barrier–crossing strategies, and how the company’s platform seeks to change the treatment paradigm by using patient-derived T cells as delivery vehicles for targeted biologics.