Like so many tech entrepreneurs before them, Wang Xiaodong and John V. Oyler met last fall over dinner to discuss how to start a business. It wasn’t the scope of their plans that was unusual, it was the locale. Between bites of stewed beef and honey-soaked cherry tomatoes in a Beijing restaurant, the two discussed how they could mount a small revolution in the pharmaceutical world from China, a country not known for drug development. Their goal: to emulate the success of biotech pioneer Genentech and launch a world-class biotech industry in Beijing focusing on cancer drugs.
