NEWS WRAP: Ribo Life enters Hong Kong biotech fast lane after strong debut

Shares of China’s leading developer of small interfering RNA therapeutics, or siRNA, jumped 42% in their Friday debut, and continued to climb on Monday

By Doug Young

Hong Kong investors can now trade in their first mRNA concept stock, following the strong trading debut for Suzhou Ribo Life Science Co. Ltd. (6938.HK), China’s leader in the field for small interfering RNA therapeutics, or siRNA.

Ribo Life’s stock jumped 42% to close at HK$82.10 on its first trading day last Friday, and continued to rise on Monday, after the company raised about HK$1.7 billion ($218 million) by selling 31.6 million shares for HK$57.97 each. The listing attracted 11 cornerstone investors, including Taikang Life and Da Cheng International Management, which collectively subscribed to 13.4 million shares, or about 42.5% of the amount sold.

The listing was Hong Kong’s first by a drug company in 2026, and comes into one of the city’s hottest IPO markets in years, with Ribo among 11 new stocks set to debut in the first half of January alone. The local portion of the listing for local Hong Kong investors was 100 times oversubscribed, while the international portion was more than 15 times oversubscribed.

Treatments utilizing ribonucleic acid, or RNA, technology have emerged as one of the hottest areas among a new generation of highly targeted drugs for treating everything from cancer to diabetes with higher efficacy and less side effects than more traditional products. Such treatments shot to fame during the pandemic when vaccines using mRNA technology were among the world’s most effective for protection against Covid.

Ribo Life currently has seven self-developed drug assets in the clinical trial stages, targeting cardiovascular, metabolic, kidney and liver diseases. Two of the most advanced are RBD4059, the world’s first siRNA drug for treating thrombotic diseases and also one of the most advanced siRNA therapeutics globally; and RBD5044, the world’s second APOC3-targeting siRNA drug to enter clinical development to treat hypertriglyceridemia (HTG).

All of the company’s products are still in the clinical stages, including upcoming Phase 2b trials for RBD4059 and Phase Two trials for RBD5044.

But Ribo has already started earning significant revenue from several collaborations, as other drug makers bet on the likelihood of success for some of its core products. In December 2023, Ribo signed one such collaboration with Qilu Pharmaceutical, granting it the rights to develop and commercialize its RBD7022 high cholesterol drug in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao. That same month, it also signed a deal with Germany’s Boehringer Ingelheim, worth up to $2 billion for both partners combined, to co-develop innovative small nucleic acid therapies to treat NASH/MASH liver disease.

As it starts to collect money from those deals, Ribo Life’s revenue rose from nearly nil in 2023 to 143 million yuan ($20.5 million) in 2024, and were on track to rise further still after reaching 104 million yuan in the first half of 2025, according to its IPO prospectus. The company lost 97.8 million yuan in the first half of last year, improving from its loss of 142 million yuan in the year-ago period.

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