The President Directly Oversees the IT Department: An AI Trial of an Innovative Pharmaceutical Company

Text by Hu Xiangyun

Edited by Hai Ruojing

In 2026, Zhou Yunshu, President of Simcere Pharmaceutical (02096.HK), brought the Information Department under his direct supervision.

At a recent media exchange meeting, he told 36Kr: "At Simcere, we now require the management team to take the lead in 'embracing' AI at work. This is not an advocacy but a mandatory requirement. The value of AI comes from how it is applied. The foundation is to truly use it, master its usage, and keep training continuously."

In the context where global pharmaceutical enterprises are actively embracing AI, this move is not surprising. Overseas, multinational pharmaceutical companies have already started heavy-asset investment. For example, Eli Lilly has built a joint AI innovation laboratory with NVIDIA. In China, in late September, multiple "AI4S concept stocks" including GenScript and Novoprotein rose sharply one after another; in the primary market, a number of outstanding startups are using AI to reshape the narrative of life sciences, and they can obtain a valuation of hundreds of millions of yuan in their first round of financing.

However, an unavoidable phenomenon is that the existing mature R&D systems of large pharmaceutical companies have been operating for many years with high efficiency. If AI wants to be truly embedded in these systems and evolve from an external auxiliary tool into an internalized capability, what is more difficult than the technology itself is the adjustment at the organizational level. After all, for pharmaceutical companies that do not have native AI genes, how to evaluate the actual value of AI in work is a major problem.

In this sense, Zhou Yunshu taking the lead personally may represent a relatively radical approach. He admitted that in the initial stage, many colleagues inside Simcere wanted to use AI but did not know how to do it. "We did spend a lot of Tokens on exploration." Eventually, the company chose the most straightforward way: embed AI technicians into each business department one by one, start from individual usage, then gradually transform AI from an auxiliary tool to a basic function, and gradually penetrate into the whole-cycle management covering target discovery, clinical implementation, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and even marketing management and organizational operation.

This is in line with Simcere Pharmaceutical's development background of accelerating the transformation from traditional generic drugs to innovative drugs.

Founded in 1995, Simcere Pharmaceutical started its business in the early years with products such as "Zailin", an oral penicillin for children, and "Anqi", a compound antibiotic of amoxicillin and clavulanate potassium. At present, its innovative drug product line covers four major fields: neuroscience, anti-infection, oncology and autoimmunity. In the first half of this year, Simcere Pharmaceutical's total revenue reached 4.58 billion yuan, of which the innovative drug sector contributed 3.887 billion yuan, accounting for nearly 85%, an increase of nearly 20% compared with 62% five years ago. Among them, the cumulative sales of its core product "Xianbixin" for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke (apoplexy) since its launch have exceeded 10 billion yuan; "Keweike (daridorexant)", a new-generation DORA-class anti-insomnia drug approved in 2025, is expected to achieve sales of 700 million yuan this year.

But looking back at the work in the past few years, Zhou Yunshu commented that the company's "innovation transformation is still not fast enough and not resolute enough". Because when the existing business was developing smoothly, everyone still held the mentality of "developing both generic drugs and innovative drugs, did not completely cut off the dependence on the traditional development path, and therefore missed some development opportunities".

Perhaps for this reason, Simcere Pharmaceutical now has a strong interest in "all tools that can improve innovation efficiency" such as AI.

According to the introduction, at the R&D level, Simcere Pharmaceutical currently mainly applies AI to front-end drug design and early target discovery, and has established an AI-aided drug molecular design (AIDD) process. In July this year, the company also reached a drug discovery and development cooperation with Schrödinger, an American AI drug R&D company, which is best at accelerating small molecule drug R&D by combining physical modeling with AI.

Attaching importance to the accumulation of AI capabilities in the early research stage of new drugs is partly because the application of AI technology in this stage is relatively mature; on the other hand, to a certain extent, it is also related to Simcere Pharmaceutical's BD strategy. In particular, the latter concerns the pharmaceutical company's rethinking of the overall global expansion of innovative drugs.

In the past three years, China's innovative drug BD overseas expansion has ushered in an explosive period. In 2025, the total value of overseas licensing contracts of Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises reached 130 billion US dollars, and this figure has exceeded 100 billion US dollars in the first half of this year. Simcere Pharmaceutical is an important participant in this wave: in the past three years, the company has disclosed 6 overseas licensing deals, with a total potential transaction value of 6 billion US dollars, and its partners include AbbVie, Roche, Ipsen, Boehringer Ingelheim, etc.

Zhou Yunshu observed that at present, as the BD overseas expansion of innovative drugs is gradually normalized, more and more pharmaceutical enterprises no longer choose to simply sell one-time rights and interests, but also begin to participate in global R&D and registration work, which is "a very important growth". However, from the perspective of product types, most of the BD products in the past few years belong to engineered development, adopt mature targets that have been druggable or completed proof of concept, and "were mainly planned based on the local Chinese market at the beginning of project establishment, rather than positioned for the global market".

In the future, to further improve the global competitiveness and keep the "BD cycle" sustainable, more attention needs to be paid to the original innovation at the early target level. Pushed back to the R&D end by this goal, it is an inevitable direction to use new tools such as AI to improve the quality of early research, attach importance to differentiated and even high-risk target layout, or include diseases that are rare in China but have high incidence in Europe and the United States into the project establishment scope.

From this dimension, extra caution is needed when laying out popular but highly homogeneous targets. Taking RAS targeted drugs as an example, Zhou Yunshu introduced that at this year's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, the breakthrough of a broad-spectrum RAS inhibitor in the pancreatic cancer field quickly aroused the industry's attention to this target. "But we also conducted surveys and visited many top experts, and found that there are no less than 20 relevant research projects that have been disclosed in China, and the project establishment is highly homogeneous. For Simcere, we still hope to focus on the core tracks, avoid low-level homogeneous competition, do not chase hot spots, and adhere to our advantageous fields."

Starting from the node of 2026, Simcere Pharmaceutical's path is actually the epitome of many Chinese innovative pharmaceutical enterprises: in the development process from running behind to running side by side, from local to global, the main line has always been pharmaceutical itself, and at the same time, the importance of AI as a key variable is also constantly increasing. Although at the current stage, the industry has not yet fully reached a consensus on how much change AI can bring, just as Zhou Yunshu mentioned, letting "employees get started with AI first" may be the most important thing.