Five years ago, Mireille Gingras was struggling to find early-stage drug compounds for a San Diego–based licensing consultancy company she founded called Sitara. She turned to the "usual pool" of companies and research institutions in Europe and Japan, but they'd all been picked dry, she says.
Then Gingras visited China, where she was "so impressed," she says, by the talent and scientific know-how of the so-called "returnees"—Chinese nationals who had trained and worked in Western countries but returned home to run academic labs and local biotech companies—that she rushed home and folded Sitara. She immediately set to work fundraising and amassing a team for a new company focused exclusively on the untapped treasure trove of Chinese compounds.
In January 2005, Gingras, a self-described "serial entrepreneur" who also started the software company MIR3 in 1999 after finishing two postdocs in neurobiology, founded HUYA Bioscience International, named after the Chinese abbreviations for ...
