PharmaEngine Inc (智擎生技) founder Grace Yeh (葉常菁) has become the Industrial Technology Research Institute’s (ITRI, 工業技術研究院) first female fellow since it started awarding business leaders with fellowships 10 years ago.
ITRI chairman Lee Chih-kung (李世光) told the 10th ITRI Laureates award ceremony on Tuesday that Yeh’s induction was significant, because in addition to being the institute’s 50th laureate, she is its first female fellow.
Yeh said she was surprised to learn that she was the first woman to be awarded.
Photo: CNA
Taiwan has many outstanding female leaders in the field of technology, but they have so far been ignored by the laureate selection committee, Yeh said, urging ITRI and other institutions to broaden their perspective.
Although women are not necessarily stronger than men, they help make society more diverse, she said.
“Woman usually have different thoughts and backgrounds, which help them be more tolerant,” she said.
Yeh thanked her parents and her husband for their support and encouragement.
She also thanked Center Laboratories Inc (晟德大藥廠) chairman Lin Rong-jin (林榮錦) for persuading her to come back to Taiwan and in 2003 establish PharmaEngine, a Taipei-based biopharmaceutical company that develops cancer treatments.
Yeh said that after she stepped down as president and CEO of the firm in 2019, she moved to Switzerland to set up Onward Therapeutics SA, a developer of hematological and solid tumor drugs.
Although her core business is now in Europe, Yeh also serves as vice chairwoman of the Taiwan Bio Industry Organization (台灣生物產業協會).
She hopes that her involvement will help make Taiwan’s biotechnology industry more international, Yeh said.
As a businesswoman, she hopes to direct more attention to gender equity so that more female ITRI fellows would be selected, she said.
Yeh received her doctorate in immunology from the Medical University of South Carolina.
At the helm of PharmaEngine, Yeh created and adopted the “no research, development only” and “networked pharma” business models for drug developers.
At the time of the firm’s foundation, the first model was particularly suitable for Taiwanese biotech companies, which were mostly at an early growth stage and had limited access to capital, therefore having limited resources for research and marketing.
Under the “networked pharma” model, firms outsource drug development processes to contract manufacturers and research organizations for new drug development.
Using this model, PharmaEngine developed two drugs — Onivyde for treating pancreatic cancer and PEP503, a novel radio-enhancer for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma.
Onivyde was in 2015 approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for intravenous use as part of a first-line combination for the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer. It was the first cancer drug developed in Taiwan to receive US approval.
PharmaEngine, which entered the local over-the-counter stock market in 2012, reached a capitalization of more than NT$30 billion (US$1.08 billion at the current exchange rate) after the approval.
At the time, the firm only had 22 employees so that each one of them was worth NT$1.4 billion, Yeh said, highlighting the profitability of the sector.
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