Eight Roads adds healthcare partner in China
Eight Roads Ventures has recruited Xin Liu, formerly of Greater Pacific Capital, as a partner in its China team.
Based in Shanghai, Liu will focus on investments by the firm’s dedicated China healthcare fund, which was launched in 2017 with a corpus of $250 million. About 40% of the fund was earmarked for therapeutics and Liu will concentrate on this area.
She spent about eight years at Greater Pacific as a managing director and head of the China office, covering healthcare in China and across Asia. Before that, she served as global head of business development for Asia Pacific and emerging markets at GlaxoSmithKline, leading strategic acquisitions. Liu also held senior positions at Hoffmann-La Roche and Eli Lilly.
Eight Roads has made 46 healthcare investments in China to date. The likes of WuXi Apptec, Innovent Biologics, Hua Medicine, Hile Bio-Tech, Denali, NKF, EyeBright and OcuMension all went on to achieve IPOs.
Recent activity includes participation in an $80 million Series A round for Citrine Medicine, a biotech developer that Eight Roads set up in conjunction with F-Prime Capital and Vivo Capital. The goal is to create China’s first rare disease therapy development platform, taking advantage of new regulations that allow orphan drugs to be approved using overseas clinical data.
Eight Roads, formerly known as Fidelity Growth Partners, spun out from Fidelity International in 2019. It often invests alongside its sister entity F-Prime, formerly Fidelity Biosciences, which is also backed by Fidelity. In addition to therapeutics, the Eight Roads China Healthcare Fund targets healthcare services, digital health, and medical technology.
“Over the past 20 years, Eight Roads has established a powerful global healthcare ecosystem supported by our vast network of experts and resources across China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe and the US. The arrival of Xin marks a significant moment for the China Ventures team in terms of our increasing ability to bring deep domain expertise and trace trends and investment opportunities,” Daniel Auerbach, global head of Eight Roads Ventures, said in a statement.
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