CSO Insights at ASGH 2026: Navigating AI, Investments, and the Future of Patient-Centric Biotech

Healthcare systems worldwide face mounting pressures. Growing demands for accessible care require rapid healthcare innovation. To address these challenges, the 6th Asia Summit on Global Health (ASGH) convened in Hong Kong on May 11 and 12, 2026. Under the theme “Fuelling Healthcare Breakthroughs,” the summit gathered over 90 influential leaders to explore global healthcare trends. One standout dialogue occurred during the “CSO Insights: Catalysing Scientific Breakthroughs and Investments for Future Health” session.  

Mr Patrick Burton, Managing Editor at PharmaBoardroom, moderated the panel, which featured four distinguished Chief Scientific Officers (CSOs) operating in diverse environments. Professor David Thomas represented Omico and The University of New South Wales. Professor Zheng Minghao brought his experience from Orthocell and The University of Western Australia. Dr Li Xiang shared perspectives from Fosun Pharma. Finally, Dr Lau Lit Fui detailed his strategic approach at Zhaoke Ophthalmology Limited. Together, they mapped out how scientific leaders must balance laboratory discoveries with commercial realities.

The Evolving Role of the Chief Scientific Officer

The modern CSO role extends far beyond the laboratory bench. Dr Li Xiang noted that he spends up to 40% of his time advising on business dealings, though science remains the core of these transactions. Fosun Pharma conducts drug development through multiple modes, including internal research, co-development partnerships, in-licensing, out-licensing, and incubating high-risk technologies via its corporate investment arm. Managing this complexity demands a well-rounded scientific leader.

Similarly, Dr Lau Lit Fui emphasized the necessity of stepping out of the scientific comfort zone to fulfill responsibilities to shareholders. He explained the stark contrast between academia and industry: “In a pure scientific world, you strive for a logical answer. But in a very complicated business world, many times you do not have a clear answer… Making the right decisions without full knowledge requires courage and wisdom.” CSOs must cultivate strategic thinking to navigate these profound uncertainties. They must constantly weigh a drug’s mechanism against its market size, safety profile, and unique value proposition.

Bridging Academia and Commercial Reality

Academic inventors often create an idea, license the intellectual property, and return to their academic practice. Professor Zheng Minghao took a different path. After founding Orthocell in 2006, he stayed to guide the company’s growth, helping it achieve a market capitalization of 300 million Australian dollars and secure three FDA-approved medical device products. He views his academic role as finding problems and his corporate role as solving them by evaluating product development strategies. Zheng finds the journey of bringing technology to patients deeply rewarding, actively dispelling the myth that licensing technology instantly makes an inventor a millionaire.

Professor David Thomas faces a different structural challenge. He leads Omico, a company sitting uncomfortably at the boundary between the public and private sectors. As a hub uniting major medical research hubs across every Australian state and territory, the not-for-profit organization aims to expedite equitable access to precision oncology and genomic screening and improve outcomes for Australian cancer patients through research-led medicine. Yet Thomas realized early on that isolation may hurt clinical success, noting that: “Academic organizations and even governments struggle to effectively engage with industry. If we maintained a pious distance from industry, we would not be treating the patients… Maintaining the focus on the patient outcomes at every stage of that journey is what keeps us honest.” 

To bridge the gap between a 20th-century healthcare system and future industry innovations, Omico established a public-private partnership model. This model successfully delivered molecular profiling to over 23,000 patients and placed almost 20% of them onto partner clinical trials. 

Beginning with the End in Mind

To catalyze true scientific breakthroughs, researchers must align their work with real-world clinical needs. Dr Li Xiang emphasized this philosophy directly, advising the audience: “It is very important to consider beginning with the end in mind. … You must keep the patients’ needs and the market needs in mind when you set out to do your discovery programs.” Li reflected on his earlier career in discovery labs, where biology and chemistry primarily drove projects. He observed that scientists might believe they have a promising target, but they often fail to identify the specific disease for which the mechanism will actually work in a clinical setting. 

This disconnect highlights a significant gap in modern drug discovery. Many younger drug hunters launch programs without understanding how clinicians will eventually use these drugs. Li stressed that scientists must thoroughly understand the unmet medical needs before they begin. Furthermore, they need to accurately gauge the difficulty of treating a particular indication and confirm whether it represents a large enough unmet need to justify the investment.

Patient-Centric Innovation in Practice

Dr Lau Lit Fui provided practical examples of this patient-centric approach at Zhaoke Ophthalmology. When evaluating a drug, he looks beyond the underlying scientific mechanism. He rigorously assesses the market size, the number of affected patients, and the unmet medical needs. Zhaoke currently has a dry eye disease product under registration review in China. This market affects hundreds of millions of people.

To add true value to current therapies, Zhaoke improved the formulation. They developed a cyclosporine gel that significantly improves patient compliance. Instead of administering two drops twice a day, patients only need to apply the gel at home before going to bed. Lau also highlighted their development of an eye drop for presbyopia, a condition affecting nearly anyone over 40 or 45 years old. This innovative drop allows patients to read their cell phones clearly within 20 minutes without wearing spectacles, demonstrating how scientific development directly addresses everyday patient friction.

Expanding Global Footprints

Commercializing these breakthroughs requires a robust globalization strategy. Zhaoke Ophthalmology began its globalization efforts about three years ago, managing a pipeline split between US-licensed assets and self-innovated assets. For assets in-licensed from US companies, Zhaoke holds rights across the Asia Pacific region, including Southeast Asia, Korea, Australia, and the Middle East. Dr Lau explained that once a product gains US approval and secures a Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product, out-licensing to other countries becomes relatively straightforward. Many Southeast Asian nations recognize the US certificate, allowing Zhaoke to register ophthalmology products without conducting additional clinical trials.

However, self-innovated assets present distinct regulatory challenges. Zhaoke developed a cyclosporine ophthalmic gel in-house over a 10-year period, which currently awaits approval from China’s National Medical Products Administration. When out-licensing these assets globally, the company faces extra hurdles because many countries do not use China as a reference country. Fortunately, Lau noted that regions like the Middle East, Indonesia, and Singapore do evaluate Chinese clinical trial data. By providing high-quality clinical data, Zhaoke can secure product registrations in these jurisdictions without funding supplementary trials, thereby accelerating global market access.

Making the Right Call on Partnerships

Strategic partnerships dictate the survival of early-stage biotech start-ups. Professor Zheng Minghao shared his framework for deciding whether Orthocell keeps an asset in-house or out-licenses it to a larger company. He established a fundamental golden rule for biotech development: “Rule number one is you never spend 100 dollars to treat a disease that 10 dollars can actually solve.” 

Zheng outlined three strict criteria to guide these partnership decisions. First, the company evaluates the clinical outcome. Second, they analyze the market size alongside the cost of development. Third, they assess the regulatory framework. If a product demands massive late-stage clinical trials that surpass a small start-up’s funding capacity, Orthocell actively seeks external partners. During this process, Zheng identifies partners possessing genuine expertise in the specific therapeutic area. He adamantly refuses to develop “me-too” products, insisting that any new therapy must feature a clear and distinct clinical differentiator.

The AI Revolution: Separating Hype from Reality

Artificial intelligence currently generates immense excitement across drug discovery, yet it also invites warranted skepticism. During the panel, the CSOs debated how to separate genuine breakthroughs from market hype. Professor David Thomas issued a stark warning against blindly trusting algorithms in oncology. He emphasized that a CSO must ask good questions to succeed. He bluntly stated, “If you ask a bad question, you get a bad answer from AI. Rubbish in, rubbish out”.

Thomas explained that AI does not inherently produce the right answer; rather, it produces an answer consistent with its training data, essentially trying to please the user as a commercial product. To protect against AI hallucination and confabulation, scientific leaders must apply an old-fashioned intuition grounded in deep field knowledge. When an AI generates an anomalous result, a seasoned CSO will recognize the discrepancy immediately. Thomas continuously refines his own clinical intuition by reviewing results and writing reports for up to 40 patients weekly in his molecular tumor board.

Embracing AI as an Enabling Tool

Despite the risks, the panel unanimously agreed that scientists must embrace artificial intelligence. Dr Lau Lit Fui warned that anyone who resists AI will inevitably be left behind. However, he cautioned that users must rigorously cross-check AI-generated information. To effectively evaluate these outputs, scientists must first build their own deep reservoir of knowledge and experience.

Professor Zheng Minghao echoed this sentiment, arguing that the scientific community must view AI as an enabling tool designed to help humans, not to replace them. He noted that researchers quickly captured the “easy fruit” by using AI to improve basic efficiency. Now, the industry deploys AI to manage increasingly cumbersome and complicated situations where human processing falls short. In these advanced scenarios, AI transitions from a simple convenience into an indispensable instrument, making previously impossible tasks achievable.

Fostering a System-Wide AI Culture

Implementing artificial intelligence requires a comprehensive cultural transformation within an organization. Dr Li Xiang revealed that Fosun Pharma officially recognizes the strategic importance of AI at the highest corporate levels. The company’s chairman issued a top-down mandate demanding that every organizational activity must include an AI component. Li described this aggressive corporate philosophy as “all in AI and AI in all”.

To execute this vision, Li directed every department to identify specific workflows where an AI agent could assist with daily tasks. He clarified that the goal remains to support employees, not to replace human workers. Li delivered a firm warning to the broader biopharma industry regarding this technological shift. He declared that the wave of AI has officially arrived. Companies and scientific leaders who fail to ride this massive wave will simply be swept away by the changing tides of innovation.

Shaping the Next Generation of Scientific Leaders

As the biopharma landscape grows increasingly complex, the panel considered the necessary traits for future Chief Scientific Officers. Professor Thomas joked that a future CSO must be a little “mad,” but quickly added that they need an entrepreneurial spirit, a deep understanding of unmet needs, and the scientific rigor to evaluate the truthfulness of a proposition. Professor Zheng highlighted the critical need for robust regulatory knowledge and the ability to conduct thorough product assessments.

Dr Lau pointed out that young scientists possess immense potential, but developing strategic thinking takes considerable time. Professor Zheng agreed, noting that future leaders cannot easily acquire the entire scope of necessary experiences in a classroom; they must gain it through hands-on, on-the-job training. Ultimately, Dr Li summarized the ideal candidate as a well-rounded, fully integrated professional who pairs broad drug discovery knowledge with a strong sense of integrity to build trust with commercial partners.

A New Paradigm for Scientific Leadership

The “CSO Insights” session at ASGH 2026 underscored that achieving global health breakthroughs demands much more than brilliant laboratory science. Today’s scientific leaders must operate as strategic visionaries who bridge the gap between academic research and commercial reality. Whether they are navigating the complexities of global out-licensing, maintaining a relentless focus on patient-centric outcomes, or separating AI hype from genuinely transformative technology, modern CSOs shoulder an unprecedented level of responsibility.

As the healthcare industry races to meet the needs of an aging global population, the principles shared by these leaders offer a vital roadmap. By embracing AI as a collaborative tool, fostering public-private partnerships, and committing to strict clinical and economic evaluations, the biopharma sector can sustainably deliver the life-changing therapies of tomorrow.

Author

Richard Chau