Its share price soared by 246.82% at the opening, and the unicorn enterprise in Zhuhai has successfully launched its IPO.

On July 21, the landscape of listed companies in Zhuhai welcomed another heavyweight unicorn.

Today, Tsinghua Biotech successfully landed on the STAR Market. The IPO offering price was 14.46 yuan per share, surging 246.82% on the first day of opening to 50.15 yuan per share, with the total market value once exceeding 23 billion yuan. It is worth mentioning that Tsinghua Biotech is also the first enterprise to be accepted after the restart of the fifth set of standards of the STAR Market.

Moving the view from the scene of the STAR Market bell-ringing all the way south to Zhuhai, this southern industrial hot spot is staging a carnival of capital and hard technology.

Pushing the time back to the beginning of the year, in the first month of 2026, Zhuhai's capital war reports were so dense that they seemed to be playing at double speed: within just one week, Zhuhai Science and Technology Industry Group, a municipal state-owned enterprise, successively delivered two heavyweight IPOs - "the first GPU stock in Hong Kong stocks" Biren Technology and "the first global large model stock" Zhipu AI. From heavy investment in AI computing power to betting on hardcore large models, Zhuhai's capital tentacles have been advancing triumphantly all the way.

Now, this southern industrial hot spot has achieved another major victory. With the ringing of the STAR Market bell, Tsinghua Biotech has officially stepped from a start-up laboratory on the coast of Zhuhai into the capital hall with a market value of tens of billions. And all this began with an all-night conversation while adjusting to jet lag in San Francisco ten years ago.

The "Billion-Dollar" Night Conversation Between Two Men

The starting point of the story took place at an overseas forum in San Francisco in 2014.

That night, LIAO Huaxin, then the scientific director of the Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) at Duke University in the United States, was immersed in a long period of thinking.

As a world-renowned expert in immunology and virology, LIAO Huaxin's academic resume is dazzling: he went to the United States for further study in 1985, obtained his doctorate at the University of North Carolina, and then taught at Duke University for 22 years, publishing more than 200 papers in top journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell. As early as the early 1980s, he made important contributions to the first isolation of the domestic epidemic hemorrhagic fever virus.

But behind the top aura, the 61-year-old LIAO Huaxin always felt that something was missing in his heart. No matter how beautiful the papers in the laboratory were, if they could not be turned into life-saving drugs, the value of science would be missing the last crucial step.

That night, in the hotel lounge, LIAO Huaxin met ZHENG Weihong, who was in a state of jet lag.

ZHENG Weihong is a standard "veteran in the pharmaceutical industry". After graduating from university in 1998, he entered the front line of sales and ran in hospital corridors and wards for nearly 20 years. "Twenty years ago, when facing severe infection cases, doctors' first choice was always imported original drugs like Roche, and domestic drugs could only stand aside." This front-line gap formed an obsession in ZHENG Weihong's heart: "Why can't China make its own First-in-class original drugs?"

A scientist with a top technical platform but suffering from the lack of industrialization channels, and a operator who understands the market, channels, and is eager to create a Chinese original innovative drug, hit it off that night.

"At that time, we both had a dream," ZHENG Weihong remembered vividly later, "Dr. Liao wanted his molecular discovery platform to be implemented; I wanted to create a 'blockbuster' with a market value of 1 billion US dollars - 1 billion US dollars is not just a commercial figure, but also a touchstone to measure the social value and technical content of a drug."

The following year, 62-year-old LIAO Huaxin resolutely resigned from his well-paid teaching position in the United States, returned to China to start a business with ZHENG Weihong, and settled in Zhuhai. They set their sights on tetanus, a field that seems old-fashioned but actually has deep pain points.

Traditional tetanus injections are either highly allergic "horse serum (TAT)", which requires patients to get several desensitization injections; or "human plasma (HTIG)" that relies on blood donation quotas, which is often hard to get and has potential infection risks. LIAO Huaxin's idea is extremely hardcore: why rely on drawing horse blood or human blood?

He used his unique skill - the high-throughput fully human monoclonal antibody research and development platform (HitmAb®), to directly screen the optimal antibody genes from human natural immune cells, create a cell bank, and then put it into an industrial bioreactor for large-scale cultivation. The original "blood drawing and purification" was completely replaced by sophisticated "industrial precision manufacturing".

The world's first fully human tetanus monoclonal antibody "Xintituo®" that does not require skin test and does not rely on plasma was thus bred in the laboratory.

The Commercialization Test of a "Thousand-Yuan Monoclonal Antibody"

Disruptive original innovation is inevitably accompanied by an extremely high threshold of trust.

"We have an original technical platform, but it is not easy to make the capital market truly understand and trust it," LIAO Huaxin sighed. Around 2015, domestic capital preferred pseudo-innovation or fast-follow innovation with high certainty, and most of them adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards such hardcore projects that tried to subvert century-old traditional therapies.

At a critical moment, the endorsement and guidance of the Zhuhai government became the key, and well-known investment institutions such as GL Ventures entered the market one after another. After that, top institutions such as Kangzhe Pharmaceutical, China Merchants Bank International, CICC Capital, Xicheng Jinrui, and Zhuhai's local Gree Financial Investment poured in one after another.

The massive increase in capital is targeting its platform-based hematopoietic capacity and high barriers.

What top PE firms like GL Ventures value is not just a tetanus injection, but HitmAb®, a fully human antibody screening platform with strong scalability. It breaks the cycle limit of traditional antibody research and development, and can continuously deliver original innovative pipelines to major diseases such as tumors, infections, and autoimmunity like an "innovative drug incubator".

The entry of pharmaceutical industry giants such as Kangzhe Pharmaceutical has directly made up for Tsinghua Biotech's shortcomings in commercialization, clinical promotion, and channel laying, forming a strong closed loop of "technology + capital + industrial resources".

In ten years, Tsinghua Biotech's cumulative financing amount exceeded 2 billion yuan, its valuation soared all the way to 5.2 billion yuan, and the team grew from 2 people to nearly 900 people.

However, in the process of product promotion, Tsinghua Biotech also encountered some practical problems.

The price of 798 yuan per injection is too high in the emergency out-of-pocket scenario compared with traditional horse tetanus injections costing tens of yuan and human tetanus injections costing hundreds of yuan.

Facing the pressure, Tsinghua Biotech quickly made strategic adjustments.

At the end of 2025, "Xintituo®" successfully entered the national medical insurance catalog, and the terminal unit price was greatly reduced to 320 yuan to 400 yuan per bottle. Although the profit margin per injection was squeezed and the profit node was postponed to 2029, it completely opened the door to access public hospitals across the country.

In LIAO Huaxin and ZHENG Weihong's chess game, the tetanus monoclonal antibody is just a stepping stone. The pipelines that are queued for subsequent promotion, such as TNM001 for preventing respiratory syncytial virus in infants (which has entered clinical phase III) and TNM005 for anti-shingles, are the real backhands of this platform-based antibody enterprise.

Zhuhai, the "Dark Horse of Venture Capital", Ushered in a Bountiful Harvest

A City's Hard Technology Ambition

Behind Tsinghua Biotech's listing in the city, there is the figure of Zhuhai's promotion.

When LIAO Huaxin brought his team back to China in 2015, he traveled to a number of major pharmaceutical towns such as Suzhou, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. But in the end, this hot team bet their entire future on Jinwan, Zhuhai.

At that time, Zhuhai was seeking industrial transformation. Facing this entrepreneurial team whose product prototype was still in the test tube, Jinwan, Zhuhai showed extreme sincerity: a 30 million yuan interest-subsidized loan was directly provided, the park factory buildings were rent-free for three years, and the investment promotion team acted as a "nanny" to handle all procedures in one stop.

"Biomedical research and development has extremely high requirements for the environment, air humidity, and even the stability of water and electricity. Jinwan is not only ecologically livable, but more importantly, the government understands the industry and dares to accompany the enterprise on its growth journey," LIAO Huaxin said.

This ten-year-long accompanying journey is a typical epitome of Zhuhai's "state-owned capital venture capital + industrial ecology" strategy in recent years.

Behind this is the extremely tough venture capital logic of Zhuhai's state-owned assets.

Different from the traditional approach of providing policies and land, Zhuhai, relying on a huge system of state-owned capital parent funds such as Huafa Group, Gree Group, and Zhuhai Science and Technology Industry Group, directly cuts into hard technology investment from the professional perspective of GP (General Partner). They adopt the "three investments" strategy of "investing in early stages, investing in hard technology, and investing in attracting enterprises" - they make heavy investments in the seed stage and early stage when enterprises are most short of money and face the most difficult technical verification, open up the investment promotion link through the method of "promoting investment through investment", and then accompany enterprises all the way from the laboratory to IPO through landing services across the entire industrial chain.

In January this year, the total scale of the Hengqin Guangdong-Macao Deep Cooperation Zone Industrial Investment Fund (referred to as "Hengqin Guidance Fund") was increased from 10 billion yuan to 30 billion yuan. More capital is pouring into the technology track.

WANG Lin, Managing Partner of Dingsheng Investment, once said that he once took invested enterprises to Hengqin for inspection, "and found that Hengqin is very attractive. After one inspection, two chairmen said that their headquarters could settle down, or at least move a certain business here."

According to the report of "Hengqin Online", as of December 2025, the Hengqin Guidance Fund has signed a total of 34 sub-funds and 24 key direct investment projects. Among them, there are many familiar faces, including well-known institutions such as Joy Capital, Legend Star, Meituan Dragon Ball, Dingsheng Investment, and Guoxiang Capital.

Broadening the view to the entire west bank of the Greater Bay Area, Zhuhai in the past two years is ushering in an unprecedented "capital harvest period".

In addition to Zhipu AI, Biren Technology, and Tsinghua Biotech, which rang the bell today, Zhuhai has successively produced IPO hardcore projects in the semiconductor, high-end equipment, and biomedical tracks in recent years. Whether it is the tiny giant A-semiconductor in the field of packaging substrates, or Jianfan Bio, which is deeply engaged in the field of blood purification, as well as the municipal unicorn camp that has emerged rapidly in the high-end manufacturing and smart hardware tracks, Zhuhai is breaking the stereotype of "the leisure backyard of the Greater Bay Area" and accelerating the formation of a gradient formation of listed companies and unicorns.

The ten-year long journey started with a jet-lagged night conversation in San Francisco, landed on the assembly line in Jinwan, Zhuhai, and finally tempered into a bright report card on the STAR Market. LIAO Huaxin and ZHENG Weihong told the industry with a full ten years: Chinese innovative drugs not only dare to walk in no man's land, but also can extract sweetness from hard bones.

This is a victory of science and business, and also the most affectionate two-way rush between Zhuhai and hard technology enterprises. When the aftersound of the bell fades away, the next story about this city and entrepreneurs has just begun.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Rongzhong Finance" (ID: thecapital), author: Abu, editor: Wuren, published with authorization from 36Kr.