Since the start of 2026, the domestic innovative drug sector has seen a sustained rise in momentum. On the policy front, clear signals have been released in succession, with the government work report for the first time explicitly designating biomedicine as a "newly emerging pillar industry," and the "15th Five-Year Plan for National Health" emphasizing "full-chain support for the development and application of innovative drugs and medical devices." At the industry level, innovation fervor continues to escalate, as China's out-licensing transaction value for innovative drugs reached approximately $110 billion in the first half of the year, a record high for the period. Among the 38 innovative drugs approved during this time, 11 featured new targets or mechanisms, all of which were developed through domestic independent research and development.
Aiming to become the "global source of new drugs," Biocytogen (688796.SH, 02315.HK) has been among the first to sense the industry's warming trend. In the first half of 2026, the company achieved a comprehensive leap in performance, recording revenue of RMB 941 million, a year-on-year increase of 51.6%, and net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 241 million, a surge of 402.3% year-on-year, maintaining profitability for five consecutive quarters. As economies of scale become increasingly apparent, net cash inflow from operating activities rose to RMB 262 million, surpassing the scale of net profit. Domestic business revenue reached RMB 380 million, with the robust demand from the domestic industry serving as a key engine driving the company's rapid growth.
Biocytogen is built around its proprietary gene editing technology, leveraging the dual platforms of a "full human antibody library and target humanized mouse library" to establish an integrated new drug R&D capability covering target validation, antibody discovery, preclinical pharmacology and efficacy evaluation, and gene editing model development. During the reporting period, the company's two major business lines progressed in tandem, with the revenue structure continuously optimized. Revenue from the innovative animal model sales business reached RMB 446 million in the first half of the year, a year-on-year increase of 62.4%, further solidifying its market-leading position. The proportion of high-unit-price products such as bispecific/multispecific antibody animal models increased, with gross margin maintained at a high level of 82.3%, underscoring the company's technical prowess and competitive advantage in the innovative animal model sector. To meet the growing demand for orders, the company's new facility in Haimen, with over 100,000 cage positions, has been gradually brought into operation, providing ample room for future capacity expansion.
The antibody development business generated revenue of RMB 218 million in the first half of the year, an increase of 33.8% year-on-year, with the "antibody shelf" entering an accelerated monetization phase. Relying on its "One Thousand Antibodies, Ten Thousand Mice" initiative, the company has constructed a repository of over 1 million authentic fully human antibody sequences targeting more than 1,000 potentially druggable targets. With the synergistic empowerment of AI and automation, this library is rapidly expanding to the hundreds of millions scale. New drug enterprises can now directly select experimentally validated candidate molecules from the "antibody shelf," transforming antibody discovery from a "needle in a haystack" endeavor into a "supermarket shopping" experience, significantly reducing both the time and financial costs of new drug R&D.
As of June 30, 2026, the company's antibody business had cumulatively signed over 455 collaboration or licensing agreements, with more than 105 added in the first half alone. Partners include multinational giants such as Merck, Gilead, and Johnson & Johnson, as well as leading domestic pharmaceutical companies, with the collaboration landscape continuously expanding. In the first half, revenue growth for preclinical products and services reached 57.9%, while R&D expenses increased by approximately 27.8% year-on-year, with revenue growth clearly outpacing expense growth, indicating sustained improvements in operational efficiency.
During the reporting period, the company officially launched its next-generation AI-driven antibody discovery platform, RenSuper Workstation. This platform leverages the large-scale in vivo immunization and real-world validation data accumulated over years of operation of the RenMice® fully human antibody mouse platform, integrating AI with high-throughput automation capabilities to form a closed loop of "intelligent screening plus rapid validation." Take the RenNano fully human heavy-chain-only antibody (HCAb) platform as an example: it achieves a maximum screening hit rate of 98%, with data validation already demonstrated across several challenging targets. Its automation capabilities cover the entire lifecycle of antibody protein production, with stable output averaging 50–100 mg per antibody protein and a throughput of 800 samples per day, reliably supporting large-scale antibody sample preparation and rapid validation needs. This platform is expected to drive the evolution of antibody discovery from "customized projects" to a "searchable, scalable, and more efficient" new model, further fortifying Biocytogen's competitive moat in the antibody discovery sector.
As the innovative drug sector trends broadly upward, Biocytogen has entered a phase of performance realization. Looking ahead, the accelerated empowerment of AI optimization and the orderly release of subsequent high-throughput automation capacity will provide additional certainty to support the company's long-term growth.
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