BioDuro Celebrates 30th Anniversary in Shanghai with Global Frontiers in Pharmaceutical Innovation
On June 15, BioDuro marked its 30th Anniversary with the symposium in Shanghai held under the theme "Accelerating Breakthroughs Through Innovation." The event brought together more than one hundred industry leaders from leading research institutions, biotechnology companies, and major pharmaceutical organizations around the world, exploring how emerging technologies are reshaping R&D, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
Thirty years is a long time in any industry. In pharmaceuticals, it spans a fundamental shift — from traditional research to data-driven discovery, and from isolated breakthroughs to work that crosses disciplines by design.
BioDuro has been part of that shift from the start. Over three decades, the company has built out an integrated platform covering drug discovery, development and manufacturing — expanding its capabilities as client needs evolved and the industry around it changed.
Opening Remarks
Dr. Armin Spura, BioDuro's CEO, opened the symposium with a welcome address and shared a short anniversary film — a look back at the company's defining moments over the past thirty years. In his remarks, Dr. Spura reflected on what has stayed constant through that time: BioDuro's role as a partner to innovators around the world. Looking ahead, he said the mission remains unchanged — to use science and collaboration to move ideas from the lab into treatments that reach patients.
Organic Chemistry as a Driver of Drug Discovery
Dr. Dawei Ma, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Principal Investigator at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, CAS, opened the keynote sessions. His talk centered on how innovation in synthetic methodology keeps pushing drug discovery forward, and why efficient chemical synthesis matters not just as a technical capability but as a lever for R&D productivity. He walked through several examples from his research, including copper-catalyzed coupling reactions, novel ligand systems, and the total synthesis of complex natural products, pointing to their implications for both drug development and industrial-scale manufacturing.
BK + PK = PD: An AI-Driven Framework to Drug Discovery
Dr. Rumin Zhang, Chief Scientific Officer of the Global Health Drug Discovery Institute (GHDDI), shifted the conversation toward how AI is changing the way researchers approach drug R&D. He proposed that binding kinetics (BK) between a drug and its target, together with in vivo pharmacokinetics (PK), jointly determine pharmacodynamic outcomes (PD), and that AI gives researchers a practical way to systematically optimize each of these parameters. Looking ahead, he sees AI doing more than just speeding up molecular design, with the potential to move the field toward multi-parameter optimization, better predictive modeling, and more rational drug design overall.
An Integrated R&D Platform: Accelerating the Path from Discovery to Development
Xiang Li, BioDuro's Chief Operating Officer and Head of the Chemistry and CMC division, outlined how the company has structured its CRDMO platform around a single goal: reducing the time and friction between early discovery and IND filing. The platform brings together innovative platfomrs including fragment library screening, DNA-encoded library (DEL) screening, Direct-to-Biology (D2B) validation, high-throughput experimentation (HTE), and integrated drug discovery (IDD), covering the full path from target identification through preclinical candidate (PCC) selection and into IND. Drawing from programs on the platform, Xiang pointed to parallel synthesis, automated screening, and data-driven workflows as the practical drivers behind faster hit discovery and optimization, adding that tighter integration across stages has cut down on the back-and-forth that typically slows programs down.
Panel Discussion: Can Emerging Technologies Actually Deliver on Their Promise?
The first panel discussion was moderated by Qiang Yu, Founder and CEO of CGeneTech, and brought together Bo Chen, CSO of CR Pharmaceutical, Yunlong Song, Founder CEO of CloudThera, Yan Wang, Founder and CEO of Weimo Biotech, Lingyun Wu, VP of Simcere Pharmaceutical, and Zhongdong Zhao, VP of Chemistry at Degron.
Drawing on their own work across different parts of the industry, the panelists covered which technology advances have genuinely changed how R&D gets done, where AI is actually being used in drug discovery today and where it still falls short, and which innovations they think are worth watching.
The panelists agreed that technology is reshaping drug R&D workflows, but that efficiency gains don't follow automatically. High-quality data, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and the ability to validate still determine whether new tools are able to actually move programs forward. As AI, automation, and new therapeutic modalities continue to develop, the consensus was that the industry is past the point of isolated wins — the harder work now is building the systems that turn technological capability into consistent R&D results.
Crossing the Blood-Brain Barrier: Expanding the Therapeutic Window for CNS Drugs
Dr. Nicholas T. Hertz, Founder and CEO of Montara Therapeutics, spoke about a persistent challenge in CNS drug development: many promising brain-targeting therapies are held back by serious peripheral toxicities, making otherwise viable targets effectively undruggable. Montara's BrainOnly™ platform takes a two-drug combination approach to address this, pairing a brain-penetrant, target-specific drug with a non-brain-penetrant peripheral blocker. The blocker prevents the active drug from being activated in the periphery, while allowing it to concentrate and act at full strength in the brain. Dr. Hertz also described how this strategy is being applied to tuberous sclerosis complex-associated epilepsy, and noted its broader potential across neurodegenerative diseases, CNS disorders, and neuro-oncology.
From Decision Support to Autonomous Innovation: How AI is Reshaping Scientific Research
Weijie Sun, Founder and CEO of DP Technology, spoke about where AI is headed in drug discovery. He described a progression from AI as a single-purpose tool to collaborative agent systems, and eventually to what he called the "AI Scientist", a model where AI takes on a more autonomous role in driving discovery. He walked through case studies showing how AI is being woven into knowledge acquisition, scientific computing, experimental design, and results optimization across research workflows. Sun sees multi-agent collaboration, specialized knowledge bases, and scientific computing capabilities as the foundation for AI becoming a genuine research partner, pushing drug discovery into a more productive era.
Targeting PRC2: New Opportunities in Epigenetic Cancer Therapy
Dr. Wei Qi, Assistant Dean and Principal Investigator at the School of Life Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, presented on the role of the PRC2 complex in tumor development and its potential as a drug target. She walked through the mechanisms of two classes of PRC2 inhibitors, those targeting EZH2 and those targeting EED, then shared her team's latest work on C36, a novel inhibitor with a distinct mechanism of action and promising antitumor activity in vitro and in vivo. Structural biology work from her lab further clarified how C36 binds to PRC2 and the basis for its high selectivity, offering new insight into inhibitor mechanism and the resistance challenges associated with this target class.
Panel Discussion: R&D Models, Capital, Regulation, and the Next Thirty Years
To close the symposium, Dr. Subas Sakya, CSO of BioDuro, moderated the panel featuring Dr. Joanna Mania, Director of Quality/Regulatory Affairs and Managing Partner at DADA Consultancy, Dr. Nicholas T. Hertz, Founder and CEO of Montara Therapeutics, Dr. Weiwen Ying, Founder and CEO of Ranok Therapeutics and Dr. Rumin Zhang, CSO of GHDDI.
The discussion covered how R&D models will need to evolve, how companies balance scientific ambition against capital constraints, whether regulatory frameworks can keep pace with new technology, and what the industry should be prioritizing over the next thirty years.
The panelists agreed that technology is only part of the equation. Turning scientific advances into treatments that actually reach patients means getting science, capital, industry, and regulation pointed in the same direction — and more than one panelist noted that alignment is often the harder problem. The group kept coming back to two things: a genuine openness to collaboration across organizations and sectors, and the patience to think beyond short-term returns.
Thirty Years In, and Looking Ahead
The symposium closed with a gala dinner that gave attendees a chance to step away from the presentations and keep the conversations going. Researchers, biotech founders, and pharma executives filled the room, and the discussions moved naturally from the day's scientific topics to broader questions about where the industry is headed.
For BioDuro, the day served as both a milestone and a reset. Thirty years in, the company is still expanding — adding capabilities, deepening partnerships, and working to move more science into the clinic. The next chapter is already underway.
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