Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, April 15th.

Today on Forbes, this pharma company is betting big on a Chinese ozempic rival.

In the summer of 2023, Dr. Amir Zamani, a 42-year-old Johns Hopkins trained physician,

who is a partner on Bain Capital's Life Sciences

team in Boston, was obsessed with obesity drugs.

OZempic, the blockbuster injectable for type 2 diabetes from Novo Nordisk, was taking America

by storm, on pace to generate some $14 billion in revenue that year for the Danish pharmaceutical giant.

Eli Lilly was nearing FDA approval for its similar weight loss drug, Zepbound.

Zamani eagerly wanted to find a competitor.

He'd been reading the early research for two years and spent months digging through reams of data

from dozens of companies.

Then, he struck gold in an unexpected place.

The portfolio of Jiangsu-Hungrui pharmaceuticals, one of China's biggest pharmaceutical companies.

Showcased in the early clinical data before him was a potential next-generation injectable weight

loss therapy that,

Lyko-Zempic and Zepbound, targeted the blood sugar and appetite-regulating hormone, GLP1.

He says, quote, it was like, wait a second, they're ahead of everybody else who's not

Novo or Lily.

Results from Phase 2 clinical trials in China ultimately showed 59% of participants lost 20% or

more of their body weight on an 8 milligram dose of the drug in 36 weeks, and side

effects were mild.

If those results hold, the drug could be especially useful for severely obese patients who

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