The recombinant collagen track will usher in a "dark horse enterprise".
Not long ago, Junhe Biopharma (hereinafter referred to as "JunHemeng") completed its B1 round of financing, with a financing amount of RMB 100 million. "FBeauty Future Traces" found that it was established less than four years ago, and no products have yet been listed, but JunHe Alliance has won four investments at the rate of "one financing a year", with a total financing amount of 400 million yuan. What is the potential of this company?
On June 26, at JunHe's first Technology Open Day, we finally got to know the strength of this technology start-up.
Complete technology and product development system
As a golden track in the consumer industry, China's medical beauty industry is growing rapidly.
According to data from the China Business Industry Research Institute, the scale of China's medical cosmetology market will reach 226.8 billion yuan in 2022, a year-on-year increase of 19.87%. It is estimated that the size of the mainland medical cosmetology market will reach 266.6 billion yuan in 2023 and 288 billion yuan in 2024. Among them, the "troika" led by collagen, hyaluronic acid, and botulinum toxin is the driving force.
Taking advantage of this shareholder trend, JunHe Alliance was officially established in November 2020, focusing on the development of innovative drugs for recombinant proteins and innovative products in the field of synthetic biology.
Xu Kui, Chairman of Junhe Biopharmaceutical
However, the real founding opportunity of JunHe Alliance is not only the market outlet, but also the feelings of the founder. According to Xu Kui, chairman of Junhe Biopharmaceutical, the founders found that many families with children with short stature could not afford expensive growth hormone, so JunHe was actually born under the original intention of "benefiting patients".
As a company that has been in business for less than 4 years, JunHemeng's "hard power" is very capable. It is understood that based on the core founding team's years of R&D and large-scale industrialization experience, the company has built a recombinant egg biopharmaceutical development platform with both druggability and innovation - prokaryotic Fc fusion protein sustained-release platform, protein efficient expression platform, protein separation and purification platform, protein in vitro refolding & self-assembly platform.
In 2021, JunHe first completed the technical development of recombinant human growth hormone, and at the same time completed the preliminary process development of recombinant botulinum toxin type A. Focusing on the dual tracks of consumer medical care and serious medical care, JunHe Alliance has developed three pipelines: growth hormone, botulinum toxin and collagen. Three different pipelines have three production sites each "responsible", including a growth hormone production site in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, a recombinant botulinum toxin type A production site in Tonghua City, Jilin Province, and a collagen production site.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the hard core strength shown by this cutting-edge company that in the past few years since its establishment, JunHe Alliance has received the favor of the capital market one after another.
In the following year of its official establishment, JunHe completed a Pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. At the beginning of 2022, it received about 200 million yuan in Series A financing led by Guangdian Capital and Tonghua County State-owned Assets Investment Holding Group Co., Ltd., followed by Hongshi Capital; Less than half a year after the completion of this round of investment, Guangdian Capital and Materia Medica Capital have invested tens of millions of yuan in the A+ round; In May this year (2024), JunHe completed a B1 round of financing of 100 million yuan.
The "annual" intensive financing directly reflects the high recognition of JunHemeng's technical strength and business prospects by the capital market.
"We use the quality system for serious medical care to make consumer medical things, which are very advantageous in terms of product quality, compliance, safety and efficacy." Xu Kui said.
So far, JunHe Alliance has created a full closed-loop capability from product R&D to industrialization with "R&D advantage + product advantage + industrialization advantage".
Seize the opportunity and take the lead in the layout of recombinant human collagen
The hottest track in Chinese beauty is non-recombinant collagen.
At present, the recombinant collagen track has occupied most of the market in consumer skin care. According to Frost & Sullivan's data, the market size of China's collagen products in 2021 will be 28.8 billion yuan, of which the market size of recombinant collagen will be 10.8 billion yuan, accounting for 37.5%, and the overall growth rate of the recombinant collagen product market will be higher than that of the industry as a whole in the future, and it is expected to increase to 54.7 billion yuan in 2025 at a compound annual growth rate of 50%.
In the Guidelines for the Nomenclature of Recombinant Collagen Biomaterials, recombinant collagen is divided into three types: recombinant human collagen, recombinant humanized collagen, and recombinant collagen. Recombinant human collagen is the most complex structure and the most difficult to prepare among the recombinant collagen, which must have two core elements: "full-length amino acid sequence" and "triple helix structure".
Compared with recombinant human collagen, animal-derived collagen has complete biological activity and stability, but there are many upper limit factors such as immunogen risk and inability to be prepared in large-scale batches. Recombinant human collagen has multiple advantages of animal-derived collagen and recombinant collagen, and at the same time overcomes its shortcomings and deficiencies, and is the new material closest to natural human collagen in structure and function. The breakthrough in the preparation technology of recombinant human collagen not only marks an important step in the transformation of the industry from animal-derived collagen to recombinant human collagen substitution, but also indicates that the industry is accelerating into a new era of using recombinant human collagen materials.
Due to the limitations of preparation technology, there are currently no recombinant human collagen products that are consistent with the structural composition, sequence length and biological function of natural human collagen at home and abroad have been approved for marketing.
According to public information, at present, only Jiangsu Chuangjian Medical has successfully developed a type III recombinant human collagen with a triple helix structure that is completely consistent with the amino acid sequence and human natural collagen, and can be industrialized.
Junhe Alliance is also one of the companies that has broken through the technical difficulties of recombinant human collagen.
"In terms of preparation method, we use the formation process of natural type I or type III collagen in the human body, and we use cell engineering in vitro to control its full-length sequence and triple helix structure, etc." Dr. Shen Yubao, R&D Director of Junhe Biopharmaceutical, introduced.
In 2023, JunHe will break through technical difficulties such as biological activity, strong stability, large-scale preparation, and immunogenicity, and complete the process development of recombinant human collagen.
According to Dr. Shen Yubao, Junhe Alliance uses cell factory preparation to simulate the in vivo production process of natural human type I/III human collagen, and uses yeast to successfully express the product to achieve product preparation, which solves the problem of immunogenicity of animal-derived collagen and the problem that the functional fragments of recombinant humanized collagen cannot exercise all the biological functions of the triple helix, and also breaks through the bottleneck of industrialization of preparation technology and preparation scale.
Its product candidates, JHM08 (recombinant type I human collagen) and JHM09 (recombinant type III human collagen), are two full-length, full-length recombinant human collagen with a triple helix structure that is identical to the sequence of natural human type I/III collagen. The structural characterization data showed that Junhemeng's recombinant human collagen had a complete full-length sequence structure and typical triple helix structure characteristics, and showed typical collagen fiber characteristics after self-assembly in vitro, and the chromatographic identification was highly consistent with that of natural human collagen.
At present, the recombinant type III human collagen developed by JunHemeng has been declared as a Class II medical device, and the preclinical research of the Class III medical device is ongoing.
The above products under development will play an important role not only in the field of consumer medicine, such as skin fillers, wrinkle removal and skin care, but also in serious medical fields, such as artificial blood vessels and stent materials for regenerative medicine. In addition, JunHe is actively developing new biomimetic materials and adaptive new tissue materials with natural human tissue structure and function, and is making every effort to broaden the application fields and market potential of related products.
It is worth mentioning that on the day of the Technology Open Day, JunHe announced that it had successfully broken through the large-scale fermentation and purification technology of recombinant human collagen, achieved stable expression under the 20-ton fermentation system, and successfully completed the development of the industrial production process of related products.
Judging from the actions of leading companies and cutting-edge companies like JunHemeng, the recombinant collagen industry has taken an important step in the transformation from animal-derived collagen to recombinant human collagen substitution.
Author/Xiang Tingting
Editor/Wu Sixin
Proofreading / Gui Yuqian