BioAtla: The Birth of a Global New Drug Innovation Hub

The success of an antibody drug ultimately depends on two things.

The first is finding high-quality antibody molecules; the second is accurately evaluating its druggability.

It sounds simple, but global pharmaceutical companies spend years on these two steps, burning billions of dollars, with a failure rate exceeding 90%.

Early drug discovery usually takes three to five years or even longer, with many targets and molecules eliminated in the long screening process. Even entering the clinical stage, many drugs eventually fail at the threshold of human trials due to the lack of precise preclinical evaluation tools.

BeiGene spent seventeen years along the technical mainline of gene editing, while simultaneously answering these two questions.

The QianShu WanKang plan builds a million-level human antibody sequence library targeting over 1,000 potential druggable targets, solving the question of “where do molecules come from,” and over 2,000 humanized mouse models for targets, solving the question of “how to evaluate accurately.”

The two business lines support each other, forming a complete infrastructure for global new drug research and development.

The capital market has already noticed the rarity of this company.

In 2025, BeiGene’s Hong Kong stock rose over 300% for the year, making it one of the strongest-performing innovative pharmaceutical companies. It surged 146% on its debut day on the STAR Market, and has hit new highs this year.

The support behind the stock price is clear: first profitable in 2024, with a net profit attributable to the parent company of 173 million yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 416.37%.

Seventeen years ago, when Dr. Shen Yulei founded this company in Beijing, the term “innovative drug” had not even become an industry consensus in China.

Today, all of the world’s top ten pharmaceutical companies have become customers of BeiGene. The growth trajectory of this company is a microcosm of China’s biotechnology moving from following to leading.

1. The first key question in antibody drug development: Where do high-quality antibody molecules come from?

The traditional path involves pharmaceutical companies immunizing animals and screening antibodies, taking three to five years and filled with uncertainties.

BeiGene offers a completely new path.

Fully human antibody mice are the “Holy Grail” of antibody drug discovery, and BeiGene’s independently developed RenMice series fully human antibody mouse platform is a leader, completely overturning the traditional path.

The company uses large fragment genomic precise modification technology to complete the complete in situ replacement of approximately 1.0 megabases of human heavy chain and approximately 1.6 megabases of human light chain in one go, making it one of the world’s highest humanized mouse platforms.

The in situ replacement strategy makes full use of the mouse’s own immune amplification system, ensuring the rich diversity of antibody genes and establishing the next generation standard for fully human antibody discovery.

What truly sets BeiGene apart globally is its “QianShu WanKang” plan initiated in 2020 based on the RenMice series platform. This plan is ambitious: to build a million-level fully human antibody sequence library targeting over 1,000 potential drug targets.

Most of these targets have never been systematically developed before, meaning BeiGene is doing something no one else is doing globally.

It’s like opening a giant “antibody supermarket,” and the “antibody shelves” have been completed and are continuously optimized for screening efficiency with AI platforms.

The company has reached a deep strategic cooperation with Meiga Technology, fully focusing on the digital and intelligent upgrade of fully human antibody research and production. The Labillion data intelligence system efficiently integrates and analyzes vast amounts of sequence and functional data generated from high-throughput screening, with AI models greatly enhancing the discovery efficiency of million-level fully human antibody sequence molecules. The deep integration of this AI platform with the QianShu WanKang plan has allowed BeiGene to seize the historical opportunity of significant changes in drug development.

The rapid commercialization of the “antibody supermarket” is the best proof.

As of December 31, 2025, the company has signed a total of about 350 transfer, licensing, and cooperative development projects. The partners are all well-known pharmaceutical companies both domestically and internationally: Merck Germany, Gilead Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, BeiGene, IDEAYA Biosciences, Xencor, ABL Bio, Neurocrine, Hansen Pharmaceutical, Nanjing Zhengda Tianqing, and more.

The value of this list goes without saying; it consists of global leading companies. In 2025, the antibody development business achieved revenue of 332 million yuan, with a gross margin as high as 86%.

The business model of upfront payments plus milestones and sales sharing means that each molecule transferred will continue to contribute revenue to BeiGene during subsequent clinical advancement and market sales.

The growth ceiling has been completely lifted.

More importantly, this model proves BeiGene’s value in the global pharmaceutical industry chain—it essentially becomes a source provider for global antibody drug research and development.

Pharmaceutical companies can directly choose molecules from this “antibody shelf,” skipping the lengthy early discovery phase, significantly reducing development risks and time costs.

The way global antibody drugs are obtained is being redefined, and BeiGene stands at the center of this transformation.

2. The second key question in antibody drug development: With good antibody molecules in hand, how do we accurately evaluate their druggability?

Human drugs ultimately need to work in the human body, but during the preclinical research phase, drug efficacy can only rely on animal models.

Traditional wild-type mice have significant species differences from humans, often unable to accurately reflect the drug’s true effects in humans. The emergence of humanized mouse models has changed this situation.

By using gene editing technology to replace specific target genes within the mice with human genes, the mice can express target structures highly similar to those in humans, allowing antibody drugs to exert their efficacy in mice.

BeiGene began building a humanized mouse library for targets as early as 2014, which is several years ahead of most industry participants.

Currently, BeiGene has over 2,000 humanized mouse strains for targets, leading globally in strain quantity.

Animal centers in both China and the U.S. are AAALAC internationally certified, with an annual production capacity of 800,000 mice, and 200 to 300 new models are added each year. More importantly, the company proactively developed corresponding humanized mouse models for numerous targets during the implementation of the QianShu WanKang plan, with many models ready before market demand exploded.

The growth data is equally impressive.

In 2025, the revenue from the sale of model animals reached 622 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 59.86%, with a gross margin as high as 80.41%. Customers mainly consist of globally thriving enterprise users, with a continuously rising repurchase rate. All of the global top 10 pharmaceutical companies have become the company’s clients.

Sales of model animals and preclinical pharmacological efficacy evaluation services naturally synergize.

As of 2025, the pharmacology and efficacy team has completed over 8,600 drug assessments for more than 950 global partners, with a customer retention rate of 80%, achieving revenue of 352 million yuan (+75.24%). The company can provide a combination of animal models, a deep understanding of target mechanisms, and precise market demand judgment, which is a combination of capabilities that general CROs find difficult to replicate.

Humanized mouse models are becoming the standardized tool for preclinical evaluation of innovative drugs globally.

They provide reliable in vivo evaluation systems for the efficacy and safety verification of monoclonal antibodies, bispecific antibodies, ADCs, nucleic acid drugs, and cell therapies for the first time. BeiGene possesses the world’s richest humanized mouse library, the largest accumulation of efficacy evaluation experience, and the most forward-looking targeting layout capabilities.

This company is defining the standards for this evaluation system and becoming its largest supplier.

3. A representative of Chinese innovative drugs going global.

Zooming out, a bigger picture emerges.

BeiGene’s overseas revenue share has climbed from 36% in 2020 to 68% in the first half of 2025. The compound annual growth rate of overseas revenue from 2020 to now has reached 64.5%.

The company has R&D, production, or operational bases in Boston, San Francisco, and San Diego in the United States, and has established a European Innovation Center in Heidelberg, Germany.

This company has already completed its transition from a “Chinese supplier” to a “global new drug research and development infrastructure.”

Its target is the world’s top pharmaceutical companies, embedding its products and services in the key upstream links of new drug research and development.

High profitability and high gross margin performance significantly exceed industry averages, reflecting the premium capability of a platform-based business model.

4. Conclusion:

Returning to the initial two questions: Where do antibody molecules come from, and how do we evaluate them accurately?

Globally, there is hardly another company that can achieve scale and industrialization in both directions simultaneously, and with both systems deeply coordinated.

BeiGene’s dual-platform system lowers the threshold and risk for global pharmaceutical companies’ source innovation, shortening the distance from the laboratory to clinical trials for new drugs, allowing more innovative therapies to reach patients more quickly.

This is the true significance of BeiGene for the global biopharmaceutical industry.

It provides the underlying capabilities that the entire industry relies on, being the most scarce source resource in the new drug research and development chain. As global pharmaceutical companies search for the next breakthrough antibody drug, more starting points are pointing to the same place.

Since its establishment, BeiGene has been committed to underlying technological research and development, daring to innovate and continuously innovating, which is essential to becoming a great company.

The seeds sown seventeen years ago are now bearing fruit, and BeiGene is qualified to be called the source of global new drugs.

This positioning, when viewed in the historical coordinates of the entire biopharmaceutical industry, carries significant weight.