‘Sea Turtles’ Give China’s Drug Startups a Shot in the Arm

In 2001, a dozen Chinese expats met one Saturday in San Jose to trade tips on pharmaceutical proteins and share career advice over craft beers and garlic fries. The gathering was a networking session organized by two friends originally from Wuhan who met in the Bay Area as graduate students in the 1990s. Fifteen years later, many members of the group have returned to China to start their own businesses. And what had been an informal networking circle is now an exclusive industry group called BayHelix that counts among its members more than 300 senior executives active in the Chinese biopharma market.

Called hai gui, or “sea turtles,” in their home country, these returnees are trading on relationships forged in the U.S. and tapping the hundreds of millions in venture capital flowing through China. They’re building or backing health-care startups and brokering deals, all in the hope of giving China an original blockbuster drug. “Everything’s falling into place,” says Nisa Leung, a managing partner at Qiming Venture Partners, a China-focused venture fund. Leung, who studied at Stanford and Cornell, has led investments in more than 50 Chinese health-care companies in the past decade. Commercial investment in China’s life sciences sector totaled more than $30 billion in 2015, up 70 percent from the previous year, according to ChinaBio Consulting.