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Every summer, doctors, researchers and drug executives from around the world descend on Chicago
to attend an important medical conference.
This is like the world's biggest cancer conference with 20 or 30,000 people in attendance.
That's Bloomberg senior reporter, Robert Langreth.
He's been covering biotech and healthcare for 30 years.
It's called ASCO
and this is one of the biggest forums for new drug studies to come out in cancer.
This year, one of the most talked about drugs came from the American pharma giant, Merck.
It already makes the world's best-selling cancer treatment
and the drug company has a new product in development
that it thinks could become one of its most important cancer medicines yet.
It's called sac-TMT.
That drug has become, you know, one of the cornerstone drugs it's testing.
It's testing in 17 late-stage trials in lung cancer,
and breast cancer and other tumors.
Merck is betting that sac-TMT could treat a range of different types of cancer.
But there's something unusual about it.
Merck didn't discover the drug, a Chinese company did.
Merck licensed sac-TMT from a Chinese company called Sichuan Kelun-Biotech,