Most pharmaceutical companies begin drug discovery with a familiar question: What disease are we trying to treat? Research organizations are typically built around therapeutic areas—cancer, autoimmune disorders, neurological disease—bringing together specialists who spend years solving problems within a particular field.

At Chugai Pharmaceutical, researchers often begin somewhere else. Instead of asking which disease deserves attention, they ask a different question: What new technology would make an impossible medicine possible?

That shift in perspective has shaped one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most distinctive research organizations. Rather than organizing discovery around diseases, Chugai develops proprietary platforms first and then explores where it can create the greatest benefit for patients. A single innovation may ultimately lead to medicines across multiple therapeutic areas.

According to the company’s 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference presentation, every Chugai-discovered molecule that has reached Phase 3 for its first indication has successfully completed that stage. Industry-wide, roughly three in ten molecules that enter this most expensive stage of development fail. Chugai has never lost one.

That reach is global. Medicines discovered by Chugai’s research organization have been approved in more than 110 countries, and the company has received nine Breakthrough Therapy Designations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—a status granted to investigational therapies that may substantially improve on existing treatment.

Underpinning that reach is a business model rare in the industry. What began in 2002 as a strategic alliance with Roche has evolved into a partnership of complementary scientific strengths. The alliance provides a stable foundation—reliable revenue from the Japanese market and global channels for Chugai-developed molecules—enabling the company to pursue long-term, high-risk research while contributing innovations across the Roche Group.

For Tomoyuki Igawa, Executive Officer and Head of Chugai’s Research Division, those results are the product of a particular way of thinking.

“Our challenge,” he says, “is to create medicines only Chugai can create.”

A Different Way Of Thinking

That challenge took shape during a defining moment. When Chugai began its strategic alliance with Roche in 2002, the partnership gave its researchers exposure to the Roche Group’s world-class scientific capabilities. Among them was Genentech, already recognized as one of the world’s leading organizations in antibody therapeutics.

“I felt they were more than 10 years ahead of us,” Igawa says.

For many companies, that realization would have been discouraging. Instead, Chugai drew inspiration from it. If the world’s best had already defined conventional antibody research, doing the same science slightly better would add little. The company would have to pursue questions no one else was asking.

That decision became more than a strategy. It became a culture. Innovation would come not from refining established approaches, but from questioning the assumptions that defined them.

Inside Chugai, that mindset is often summarized in a simple phrase: Cross the boundary. The phrase applies to more than therapeutic areas. It describes crossing the boundaries between scientific disciplines, between accepted ideas and unexplored possibilities, and ultimately between what today’s science can achieve and what tomorrow’s might make possible.

The dive to cross boundaries becomes most visible in Chugai’s scientific breakthroughs. One of the clearest examples came from hemophilia A, a genetic bleeding disorder associated with deficient factor VIII activity. For decades, treatment focused on replacing the clotting factor patients lacked—through two to three intravenous injections every week.Chugai’s researchers asked a different question: what if the missing protein did not need to be replaced at all? The idea was first validated in landmark studies published in 2012 and 2013, which showed that a bispecific antibody could mimic the activity of factor VIII and restore clotting through an entirely different approach.¹˒² The work later contributed to the 2026 Lasker~DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award, awarded to three Chugai researchers, including Igawa.

The breakthrough challenged more than conventional treatment. The resulting therapy helps prevent bleeding through regular subcutaneous administration, reducing the burden of treatment and making everyday life easier for many patients and their families.

That same willingness to rethink accepted ideas shaped Igawa’s work on recycling antibodies, first reported in Nature Biotechnology in 2010. Rather than binding a target only once before being cleared from the body, these engineered antibodies can bind a target multiple times—releasing it inside the cell, returning to circulation and binding again—opening new possibilities for longer-lasting therapies. Sweeping antibodies, switch antibodies and next-generation bispecific antibodies all followed the same approach. Rather than treating antibodies as fixed biological molecules, Chugai continues to treat them as platforms that can themselves evolve.

Quality Without Compromise

Developing entirely new approaches requires patience. It also requires resisting one of the strongest pressures in preclinical research: moving candidates into clinical development as quickly as possible. For Igawa, both speed and quality matter. But quality must remain the priority.

Chugai describes this as a quality-centric approach to drug discovery. Researchers continually refine each drug molecule to the highest quality, identifying candidates with not only the best biological activity but also the best selectivity, safety, stability, pharmacokinetics and dosing convenience. Every candidate in each drug discovery program must represent the best molecule the team believes current science can produce.

Throughout the interview, Igawa repeatedly returned to two questions: What are we creating? Why should it work? The first concerns innovation. The second concerns evidence. Before a project advances, researchers seek convincing experimental data explaining why a candidate should benefit patients. If the evidence does not support the hypothesis, the project stops—not because the research has failed, but because the science has answered an important question.

That discipline helps explain Chugai’s unusually high success in late-stage development. The goal is not simply to move molecules into the clinic—often the default KPI of a research organization in the pharmaceutical industry. It is to move forward only when researchers are confident they have created the strongest candidate possible.

Macrocyclic Peptides As A New Modality Beyond Antibodies

Even as Chugai continued expanding the capabilities of antibody therapeutics, researchers recognized a fundamental limitation. Antibodies are exceptionally precise, but they are also large molecules. As a result, they generally cannot enter living cells, leaving many disease-causing proteins beyond their reach.

Rather than accepting that limitation, Chugai asked another boundary-crossing question: what kind of platform could combine the target specificity of antibodies with the accessibility of small molecules to reach previously inaccessible intracellular targets—including protein-protein interactions once considered "undruggable"? The result is SnipeTide™, Chugai’s proprietary macrocyclic peptide platform. ³ SnipeTide aims to expand the range of diseases that can be addressed while creating the possibility of orally administered therapies in areas traditionally dominated by injectable antibodies.

For Igawa, the platform reflects the same conviction that has guided Chugai’s research for decades: when existing approaches reach their limits, build new ones.

AI Begins With Better Experiments

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping Nature Biotechnolog , but Igawa believes its greatest value is often misunderstood. “AI can only learn from what it has seen,” he says. For companies working in well-studied areas of biology, public datasets provide an enormous starting point. Chugai, however, deliberately explores scientific territory where little prior knowledge exists. In those spaces, the competitive advantage lies not simply in better AI algorithms, but in generating unique experimental data that no one else possesses.

Every week, automated laboratory systems at Chugai Life Science Park Yokohama physically synthesize and test thousands of unique antibodies. Those proprietary datasets become the foundation for building proprietary AI models, creating a cycle in which experimentation strengthens AI—and AI, in turn, helps scientists design better experiments. Rather than replacing researchers, Igawa sees AI as amplifying human creativity and scientific judgment.

From Innovation To Co-Creation

Crossing boundaries has shaped not only Chugai’s science, but also the way the company approaches collaboration. Recognizing that breakthrough discoveries increasingly emerge through partnership, Chugai has expanded its presence in the world’s leading biotechnology ecosystems. The Chugai Venture Fund in Boston supports emerging life-science companies, while the Partnering Office established in South San Francisco in 2026 strengthens relationships with researchers, entrepreneurs and academic institutions across the Bay Area and the broader U.S. innovation ecosystem.

For early-stage biotechnology companies and academic laboratories, scientific insight is rarely the limiting factor. The greater challenge is translating promising discoveries into medicines. Chugai’s strategy is built around that transition: combining novel biology from external partners with proprietary drug-discovery platforms developed over decades. Rather than seeking to absorb outside innovation, the company aims to amplify it.

One recent collaboration illustrates that strategy. Professor Shimon Sakaguchi, whose pioneering work on regulatory T cells was recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is collaborating with Chugai to advance research in immunology.

The collaboration with Sakaguchi is part of Chugai’s broader open innovation strategy. By bringing together expertise from academia and industry, the company aims to accelerate scientific discovery and expand the possibilities for future treatments. Recent initiatives include a Master Collaboration Agreement with University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),designed to facilitate future drug discovery collaborations.

Toward the end of the interview, Igawa shared what continues to motivate him after 25 years at Chugai—more than two decades of them in drug discovery. Research, he says, is the chance to explore places no one has explored before; every unanswered question holds the possibility of discovering something genuinely new. Exploration, though, is only part of the story. For Igawa, it becomes most meaningful when a discovery reaches patients and changes their lives.

Looking back, the choice Chugai made in 2002—to pursue what no one else was pursuing rather than follow the industry’s established path—now seems almost symbolic. Faced with science that appeared years ahead, the company chose to build its own way forward. Today, that choice is reflected not only in its scientific platforms, but also in a research culture defined by curiosity, rigorous experimentation and a willingness to cross boundaries others accept without question.

For scientists, entrepreneurs and academic researchers, Chugai offers more than advanced drug-discovery capabilities. It offers a distinctive approach to innovation—one built on the belief that the most important breakthroughs often emerge where disciplines intersect, assumptions are challenged and complementary strengths come together.

It does not begin by asking what medicines the world already knows how to make. It begins by asking what medicines have not yet become possible.

1 Kitazawa T, et al. Nature Medicine. 2012;18(10):1570–1574.

2 Sampei Z, et al. PLoS ONE. 2013;8:e57479.

3 Ohta, A. et al. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023;145(44):24035–24051.