Per Reporter: Slippery
In May 2010, Room 207, Block B, Shuguang Building, Sanyuanqiao, Beijing, opened a new company called Berry Gene. One of the most mainstream nipt (non-invasive DNA prenatal testing technology) products today, Berry Gene's "Bebian" was born in this rented office for the first time.
"It was a film and television company opposite, and we were doing experiments in the middle of the night in white coats, and they were rehearsing scripts. People on both sides looked at each other, they had no idea what we were doing every day, and probably thought that the company's script was the same every day. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the company, Gao Yang, chairman of Berry Gene, was interviewed by the "Daily Economic News" and shared the above interesting things in the past of entrepreneurship.
In the past ten years, Berry Gene has taken nipt as a breakthrough and gradually built a whole industry chain of genetic testing with sequencing platform and reagents as the upstream, detection in the fields of reproductive health, genetic diseases, and tumors as the midstream, and big data applications and consumer-grade genetic testing as the downstream. The company was listed on the main board of A-shares in 2017, and its current market value exceeds 20 billion yuan.
Among the many breakthroughs made by Berry Gene in the past, Gao Yang was most impressed by the completion of the company's first nipt product research and development. Looking to the future, Gao Yang's confidence in tumor early screening products is even stronger than nipt.
"We were able to detect early liver cancer of less than 1 centimeter, which was a great shock to doctors." Gao Yang introduced that after the early liver cancer is detected, patients can undergo minimally invasive surgical treatment such as radiofrequency ablation. Compared with the traditional medical concept, it has made great progress.
Berry Gene Chairman Gao Yang
"Gamble" founded Berry Gene
2020 marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of Berry Gene and the 18th year that Gao Yang has entered the genetics industry. Talking about why this emerging industry was chosen at that time, Gao Yang's explanation was that "the industry chose me".
In 2002, after completing his studies at the School of Life Sciences of Fudan University, Gao Yang originally planned to go abroad for further study, which was also the mainstream choice for genetics graduates at that time. But waiting for a visa was longer than expected, and he had to look for a job first.
Gao Yang described the experience as "like closing a window and opening another door." At that time, only the first generation of sequencing technology was available in the whole industry, providing sequencing services for scientific research institutions, which was the main business of domestic gene industry companies at that time.
In 2003, on an opportunity to attend an academic conference in the United Kingdom, Gao Yang met his later entrepreneurial partner Zhou Daixing. "There were very few Asian faces at the conference, and I was particularly impressed by that time, because what he said at the meeting was so advanced that no one could even ask questions during the question session, which is rare in foreign academic conferences."
In 2003, the SARS epidemic broke out in China, but the development of the gene industry was accelerating. With a high medical background and family background, he is naturally interested in the clinical application of genetic testing technology. In 2004, Gao Yang entered the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences to pursue a doctorate in genetics. During this period, he used haplotype analysis to find that a 6-base deletion insertion polymorphism in the casp8 transcription initiation region was associated with the susceptibility of a variety of tumors, including lung cancer, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, colorectal cancer, etc.
Gao Yang saw Zhou Daixing again in 2006, and this meeting also gathered Hou Ying, the founder of Berry Gene. Together, the three promoted more applications of second-generation sequencing technology in China.
In 2010, he founded Berry Gene with Zhou Daixing and Hou Ying. Gao Yang introduced, "The purpose of starting this company is very simple, that is, to do nipt projects. We want to bring gene sequencing technology to the clinical market, and NIPT is the closest. ”
Nipt's design was originally co-led by Zhou Daixing and Professor Lo Yu Ming from the University of Chinese in Hong Kong. Theoretically, the technology can detect the free DNA of the fetus and determine whether the fetus has a genetic disease by simply drawing the maternal peripheral blood. Compared with the amniocentesis performed on pregnant women after the traditional Tang screening has found the risk, nipt is non-invasive, which can reduce the probability of intrauterine infection and fetal miscarriage in pregnant women. The gradual maturity of high-throughput sequencing technology has made it possible for NIPT to enter the clinic.
"With such good resources and opportunities, we will start a business and gamble." But until the day Berry Gene was established, we weren't entirely sure that this thing (nipt) would work out. Gao Yang told the "Daily Economic News" reporter.
In May 2010, Berry Gene rented Room 207, Block B, Shuguang Building, and a team of more than 20 people began to do experiments day and night. Gao Yang frankly said, "We actually still have some luck components in it, the project is too early, too advanced, the sequencing cost is very high, and it can't be sustained at all; if it is late, it may be ranked fourth and fifth in the market." ”
Unforgettable first kit development success
Gao Yang introduced that Berry Gene only had 10 million yuan of funds on the account at the beginning of its establishment, and after a large amount of investment in research and development, the introduction of investment was imminent. "Domestic investors thought we were too ahead of the curve, and at that time, their investment was still dominated by tmt (technology, media, telecom)."
In the early days of its establishment, Berry Gene once encountered a wall in the capital market. "Investors told us that at that time, there were many domestic entrepreneurial opportunities, and it was best to use the copy to China model, with foreign references, which could be analyzed and compared." Gao Yang recalled the dilemma of financing that year. In fact, the Berry gene in 2010 has no comparable objects, including the United States.
"By 2011, there was almost no salary, and the company was only established for less than a year," Gao Yang said with a smile. "If you ask the company what the core competitiveness was at that time, it is that our entrepreneurial team cooperates better than other teams, we work hard; our technology is better."
In 2011, Berry Gene received a Series A financing from Legend Capital of $17.8 million. In 2013, the company raised another $25 million in Series B funding, led by Qiming Venture Capital. The financing of that year was undoubtedly a charcoal in the snow, and it played a cornerstone role in the journey of the tenth anniversary of the establishment of Berry Gene.
But if you can only pick one thing, as a representative of the most memorable event in the company's development decade, Gao Yang did not hesitate to choose this one: "Our colleagues in the R&D line came to me one day and said that they really made the nipt kit. At that moment, I knew we were going to succeed because we had done it on a technical level. ”
"One more thing to say, the first pregnant woman we tested was an elderly pregnant woman, and the doctor's advice to her was that this child should not be wanted." At that time, the nipt technology of Berry Gene could not do the current "Bebian" product to detect three fetal chromosomal diseases of Down syndrome, Edwards syndrome and Partau syndrome, and Gao Yang asked the pregnant woman, if the risk of Down syndrome can only be excluded, will it be done?
She told me that she could rule out one of the remainder she recognized. The final decision is made by the pregnant woman herself, and when everyone is against her, she only needs a small weight for us. "Ultimately the baby this pregnant woman gave birth to was healthy.
This incident deeply touched Gao Yang, "The mission of Berry Gene is to want hospitals and patients to be able to use our technology. ”
Confidence in early tumor screening is stronger than nipt
In 2017, Berry Gene landed on the A-share main board for listing, and in the same year, Berry Gene spun off its tumor business and established Herui Gene, and attracted strategic investors such as Legend Capital, Boyu Investment, Qiming Venture Capital, Andron Capital to increase capital by 800 million yuan. This was the largest single investment in the field of tumor genetic testing in China that year.
In April 2018, Herui Gene, together with the National Liver Cancer Science Center/Oriental Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital of naval military medical university, and Guangzhou Nanfang Hospital jointly launched the precar project. More than 10,000 high-risk groups of liver cancer will be recruited to establish a follow-up monitoring cohort and carry out a three-year prospective cohort study, with a total investment of more than 100 million yuan.
Talking about the ongoing tumor early screening project of the shareholding subsidiary and Rui Gene, Gao Yang's confidence in this project is stronger than when the company developed the nipt project. "In the liver cancer early screening test, we found tumors of less than 1 centimeter in the enrolled population, which was a great shock to the doctors." Gao Yang introduced that in comparison, patients with early tumors who are screened do not necessarily have intuitive feelings, because patients do not experience the pain of advanced cancer at this time.
But for doctors, many of them are in contact with patients with advanced cancer, and even if they and their families pay a huge amount of time and money, it is difficult to restore the health of tumor patients. Patients with very early tumors can now be screened for just by drawing a tube of blood, and the survival of patients can be greatly extended by only surgical treatment such as radiofrequency ablation. Compared with the traditional medical concept, it has made great progress. "Our industry is more of a to b, and if the doctor gets a very good feeling, my confidence in early tumor screening is even a little stronger than nipt."
The latest phased research results released by the precar project at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Chinese Society of Clinical Oncology (CSCO) in 2019 show that the time of liver cancer detection based on the predictive model is 6 to 12 months earlier than the time of gold standard diagnosis, achieving a true sense of forward-looking early screening, and the project is expected to land at the end of this year.
The whole industry chain does not form a closed loop
In the past ten years, Berry Gene has taken nipt as a breakthrough and gradually built a whole industry chain of genetic testing with sequencing platform and reagents as the upstream, the detection of reproductive health, genetic diseases, tumors and other fields as the midstream, and big data applications and consumer-grade genetic testing as the downstream.
In the past 2019 alone, Berry Gene's nipt kit (Bebian) became the first product in the industry to continue to be registered successfully. The company's nextseq cn500 sequencer has been approved to change the scope of application, surpassing nipt and becoming a general-purpose second-generation sequencing platform that can be applied to the detection of tumors, genetic diseases and other diseases. The tumor early screening business, which is about to land, is also considered to be a heavy product line of Berry Gene's "rebuilding a nipt" level.
Gao Yang interpreted the idea of Berry Gene to build the whole industrial chain of the genetic testing industry for the "Daily Economic News" reporter, "In fact, we have arranged around the upstream and downstream industries of listed companies, not that we want to make the entire industrial chain of gene sequencing into a closed loop." ”
"We're not going to develop upstream hardware or software, but we're going to vigorously bring in and invest in some companies and deploy upstream."
"Midstream is the application, and products like nipt, which is also our top priority. At present, the company has developed relatively large varieties, requiring an annual detection volume of 100,000 to 1 million. "Gao Yang believes that in the next ten years, the midstream will be an important application scenario in the field of genetic testing." Similarly, in addition to ourselves, the company also hopes to layout through some cooperation and investment. ”
When talking about the downstream of the whole industry chain built by the company, Gao Yang first corrected a common misunderstanding in the outside world. "Downstream" cannot be simply understood according to industrial standards. Citing the field of gene therapy as an example, he expressed that the company would play to its advantages in the midstream and cooperate with more innovative drug research and development companies.
The "Daily Economic News" reporter noted that compared with the brisk expression in recalling the company's ten-year entrepreneurial process, Gao Yang's language and wording have become more rigorous subconsciously when introducing the company's entire industrial chain layout. "He's just a standard science and engineering man," one lofty colleague described him.
Among the three founders of Berry Gene, two are from technical backgrounds. Therefore, in the eyes of the outside world, this company carries a "science and engineering man" temperament. But unexpectedly, Gao Yang believes that Berry Gene is a more feminine company, which is mainly the company's current customers are mainly pregnant women.
"It's a woman, she's a very young, wise, inclusive, enterprising woman." Gao Yang believes that the corporate culture released by Berry Gene in the past ten years is also soft and rigid, because within the scope of ability, Berry has always attached great importance to the service to customers; where the ability is reached, the pursuit of technology is always a little ahead, a little ahead.
"After that, the company will enter a stage of rapid development, and many of the more hardcore pipeline products will be listed." Therefore, the Berry gene in Gao Yang's eyes may be a full-fledged goddess who is preparing to soar into the sky.
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