Latest news with #Innogen
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Chinese Drugmaker Aiming to Sell Obesity Meds Soars in HK Debut
Guangzhou Innogen Pharmaceutical Group Co., a Chinese biotech firm looking to tap the vast domestic market for obesity drugs, surged as much as 296% in its trading debut in Hong Kong. Shares of Innogen, which focuses on diabetes and metabolic diseases, climbed to HK$74 Friday, compared with its initial public offering price of HK$18.68. The company raised nearly HK$683 million ($87 million) in its IPO.
South China Morning Post
2 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Innogen's shares almost quadruple in Hong Kong trading debut amid pharmaceutical bull run
Shares of Guangzhou Innogen Pharmaceutical Group soared on their Hong Kong debut, buoyed by strong investor appetite for China's pharmaceuticals sector, which has enjoyed rising valuations and solid performance. Trading under the stock code 2591, Innogen's shares first changed hands at HK$72 on Friday, almost four times more than the initial public offering (IPO) price of HK$18.68 despite a declining market. The city's benchmark Hang Seng index opened almost 1 per cent lower. The debut performance of the maker of drugs for diabetes and other metabolic diseases followed Chinese vaccine maker Ab&B Bio-Tech's 158 per cent gain on its first day of trading on Monday. The success of Innogen's share sale was bolstered by a rally in major biotech companies in Hong Kong, which gained an average of 137 per cent this year, according to a CCB International report on Wednesday. Investors were willing to pay more for each unit of sales in the sector as the price-to-sales ratio rose to 18.8 times from 8.7 times in December 2024. Innogen, which raised HK$683 million (US$87.2 million) through its IPO, followed peers that also took advantage of the Hong Kong exchange's Chapter 18A listing rule for pre-revenue biotech firms. These included Nanjing Leads Biolabs and TransThera Sciences, whose shares have jumped 88.3 per cent and 263.5 per cent, respectively, since their debuts this year. Innogen also emerged as one of the most popular IPOs among retail investors, as many were unable to successfully subscribe to the stock during the IPO stage, boosting sentiment for its debut.
Reuters
01-07-2025
- Business
- Reuters
China's Innogen expects to complete weight-loss drug trials next year
SHANGHAI, July 1 (Reuters) - Chinese drugmaker Innogen expects to complete a late-stage clinical trial of its experimental weight-loss drug candidate next year, its CEO said on Tuesday, the latest Chinese company to join the race to develop obesity treatments. Chinese companies are rushing to develop drugs belonging to the GLP-1 class of medications for weight loss and related conditions as the patent of Novo Nordisk's ( opens new tab semaglutide, a key active ingredient in its best-selling Ozempic and Wegovy drugs, is due to end in early 2026 in China. "I think the Phase IIB will be out by the end of this year, then Phase III will be (finished) by next year,' Innogen CEO Wang Qinghua told Reuters in an interview about the company's experimental drug candidate. Initial results from an early trial, published in June, opens new tab, showed people on the experimental efsubaglutide alfa injection lost about 7% of their body weight after four weeks. By comparison, large-scale trials over a longer period for Novo's weight-loss drug Wegovy helped people lose an average 15% of their body weight, according to its clinical trial data. Wang said the efficacy in Innogen's experimental injection was not fully visible in the firm's drug study because of the short evaluation time, adding the company expects to get more significant weight reduction as it continues with more studies. Chinese regulators have already approved the Shanghai-based company's self-developed efsubaglutide alfa as a once-weekly injection for the control of Type 2 diabetes in January. Yurou Zheng, an analyst at Morningstar, said the near-term challenge for weight-loss drugs in China would be potential price competition, as more drugs are coming online. "I think many users are more likely to pivot to cheaper options if the efficacy profiles are similar or even slightly less superior as long as they are well within a few percentage points," he said in a note. On Friday, Chinese drugmaker Innovent Biologics ( opens new tab became the latest local company entering the increasingly crowded weight-loss drug market, saying its treatment mazdutide, which is licensed from Eli Lilly (LLY.N), opens new tab, was approved by the country's regulators. The Suzhou-based firm said in June that a Phase III trial showed that after 24 weeks of treatment, 6 mg of mazdutide led to about an 8% change in body weight from baseline. Underscoring growing competitive pressure in China, India's Biocon ( opens new tab dropped plans to commercialise its weight loss drugs in China, a senior executive told Reuters last week.
Scroll.in
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
How to live through the end of the world: Read William Shakespeare's play ‘Cymbeline'
Written in 1611, Shakespeare's Cymbeline is a raw mess – full of feeling and as messy as life. The 18th-century man of letters, Samuel Johnson decried the play as a work of 'unresisting imbecility', a hotch-potch of incongruities. It's true that it's hard to even know what kind of play Cymbeline is. The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, presents it as the last of his tragedies. But it's also, all at once, a history play, a pastoral, a fairytale, a pantomime and a tragicomedy. Set in ancient Britain at the time of the birth of Christ, Cymbeline stitches together three plots. In one, Posthumus (the banished husband of Innogen, King Cymbeline's daughter) accepts a wager with Iachimo that the sleazy Italian will not be able to seduce his wife. In the second, after 20 years, King Cymbeline's abducted sons (and Innogen's brothers) are restored to him. And in the third, refusing to pay tribute to the emperor, tiny Britain picks a fight with the majesty of imperial Rome. In the age of anxiety What makes Cymbeline such a potent play for our own age of anxiety is how Shakespeare weaves a tale about the collapse of everything known, as connections dissolve, and lays out how we may discover ourselves anew in the radically altered world. Written late in his career, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare rips up all the ways he's been doing things and suddenly starts afresh. Here, some few years before his retirement, he foregoes the complex psychology of his great tragedies and opts for archetypes of fairytale and romance. But in striking out for this new artistic territory, he also turns to himself as his own best source. Like an ageing rock band contracted for one last farewell tour, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare's back playing the hits. Like King Lea r, Cymbeline is set in ancient Britain. Sneering Iachimo is Iago's ghost and Posthumus, a dollar-store Othello. Innogen is Shakespeare's last cross-dressing heroine, passing as a boy, a faded echo of witty Rosalind of As You Like It and sad Viola of Twelfth Night. There's fun in Rosalind and Viola's changed identities, but Innogen puts on boy's clothes to escape. Her father condemns her as disobedient for marrying Posthumus, and instead pushes her towards her step-brother, the fatuous bully Cloten. Innogen's time as a boy is joyless, as she learns that her beloved Posthumus wants her killed. She's a new person now, not Innogen, but 'Fidele'. Unmoored, adrift, she unwittingly finds her brothers, falls ill and mistakenly consumes a drug that puts her into a sleep so deep she appears to be dead. She wakes from this seeming death beside a headless body that she takes to be her murdered husband, but is in fact the villainous Cloten. Desperate with grief, she touches the flowers that have been strewn on the corpse, and smears herself with his blood. It's as stark a scene as Shakespeare ever wrote in its unstable unity of tender beauty and suffering. Innogen sighs: 'These flowers are like the pleasures of the world, This bloody man, the care on't,' and in that conjunction sums up the extremities of life and of this play. When a Roman soldier finds her, she tells him: 'I am nothing; or if not, Nothing to be were better.' Dying to live Politically, too, things are disintegrating. The play multiplies broken bonds, unpaid debts and contracts denied – including both the marriage contract, and the debt of tribute owed to Rome by Britain. Following Innogen's passage through suffering and figurative death, Posthumus undergoes the same process. He has already earned his name by outliving his parents. Reduced, like Innogen, to all but nothing, believed to be dead, but actually in prison, Posthumus receives a vision of his dead family and of forgiving Jove, the divine father of the Roman Gods. Love and social unity have died, but in this mystical scene, the possibility returns of renewal. Both Innogen and Posthumus must 'die' to live. Off stage, in distant Bethlehem, a nativity takes place that signals the death of the old Rome – but also the regeneration of all things. And so the story commits itself to the reconciliation achieved in wonder. This is a play where the word 'miracle' becomes a verb, just as Innogen and Posthumus, and old, foolish King Cymbeline himself come to understand how even the most distressed life may open to bliss. 'The gods do mean to strike me to death with mortal joy,' declares an amazed Cymbeline, as the play offers us a vision of that astonishing unity of suffering and redemption. We may doubt that such wonder could exist for us today. But Shakespeare's full look at the worst enables us too to imagine the sense of hopeful possibility found in his brilliant conclusion. It is a wonderful play.
