Chinese biotechs push on into the clinic

New clinical trial listings have revealed two Chinese companies, TCRCure Biopharma and GeneScience, each taking a pair of new assets into their first human studies. All four aim to hit what can be described as popular targets that have been extensively pursued by other biopharma players.

TCRCure, a biotech with a cell therapy focus, is advancing two Car-T therapies, one hitting GPC3 and the other DLL3; the latter appears to be a more popular antigen for antibody approaches than for Car-T. For GeneScience the focus is antibody-drug conjugates, where the group is taking bispecific approaches to hitting folate receptor-α, the target of Elahere, B7-H3 and PSMA.

While there are numerous anti-FRα ADCs in clinical development aiming to do better than Elahere, GeneScience’s GenSci140 is the first that uses a biparatopic approach, hitting two distinct epitopes on the FRα protein. Two other biparatopic anti-FRα ADCs to watch are Innovent’s IBI3010 and LaNova’s LM-007, but neither has yet made it into human trials.

GeneScience’s other clinical entrant is GenSci143, an ADC against B7-H3 and PSMA. This appears to be an unusual paring of antigens, but mirrors Hangzhou DAC's ADC DXC014, which entered its first clinical trial in solid tumours in October.

Car-T

In Car-T therapy GPC3 is by now established as a hot target in solid tumours, courtesy of AbelZeta/AstraZeneca’s C-CAR031/AZD7003, and TCRCure’s TC-G203 is the latest to enter the fray.

It’s perhaps TCRCure’s other clinical entrant, TC-D101, that appears more novel, given that it hits DLL3, the target of Amgen’s approved T-cell engager Imdelltra. While Imdelltra spawned a pipeline of imitators among rival T-cell engagers and ADC approaches, using the Car-T modality appears still to be a relative rarity, OncologyPipeline revealing just five other clinical-stage assets.

Coincidentally, given AstraZeneca’s involvement in GPC3, one of those appears to be from Astra itself: GC511B has just entered a Chinese investigator-sponsored study, and it’s only this trial’s listing on a Chinese registry that reveals the application to have come from Astra. 

Judging by the project's code it might be derived from Astra's 2023 acquisition of China's Gracell. It seems that the UK company, having come late to Car-T, is focusing increasingly on solid tumours and in vivo approaches.

Recently disclosed first-in-human studies*

Notes: *these projects were first listed on the clinicaltrials.gov database between 20 and 26 Nov 2025; **investigator-initiated study.

Among other projects newly into clinical trials there are a couple of small-molecule approaches, namely an undisclosed asset from AbbVie, ABBV-711, and a degrader from the private company Degron Therapeutics.

Degron raised $20m in a series A round of venture financing last year, and the project in question, DEG6498, appears to be its first to enter human testing. DEG6498 is described as a molecular glue degrader against human antigen R (HuR), an RNA-binding protein encoded by the ELAVL1 gene, and works by inducing an interaction between HuR and the cereblon E3 ligase.

Degron’s pipeline also includes a degrader of Wee1, and a conjugate that uses a GSPT1 degrader as its payload, but these are still at the preclinical stage.