When Dr Yang Dajun who is working on curing diseases related to aging, chose to return to China in 2005 to launch his own biopharmaceutical start-up after almost two decades in the US, he said the decision wasn’t easy.

“It was a bit difficult as at that time China’s biotech industry was at a very early stage. A lot of things were not available, especially the financial environment. But I’m not regretting the decision,” Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Ascentage Pharma, told FinanceAsia in an interview.

Yang went to the US in 1986 to study oncology broadly, the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer....