In June, Vivace Therapeutics burst its stealth bubble by announcing it had raised $40 million in venture capital. In fact, the San Mateo, California company had already been in existence for two years, but deliberately kept its public profile low -- invisible, actually. The reason? Its novel science. As Sofie Qiao, PhD, President and CEO of Vivace, told ChinaBio® Today in an exclusive interview, “We stayed covert; it was really early stage and novel; we wanted to see how it turned out.” Ten years ago, Dr. Qiao was CEO at LEAD Therapeutics, a company with a similar business plan: an early stage US virtual company using China CROs. But compared to LEAD, Vivace shows how much the China novel drug development ecosystem has matured in ten years.
