DXY Founder Stanley Tiantian Li: Turning Physicians’ Needs into a Compass for Drug R&D
At BIOHK 2026, DXY Founder and Chairman Stanley Tiantian Li shared his perspective on how physicians could become true partners in drug R&D, and how clinical needs could help inform new directions for innovation.
Behind every new drug, from molecule to patient, are two of the most closely connected stakeholders: drug R&D professionals and physicians. The ultimate goal of the former is to address unmet clinical needs through drug development, while the latter repeatedly encounter real-world clinical challenges in the consultation room. Those challenges are precisely the most reliable compass for guiding R&D.
As AI makes it possible to truly “hear” what is happening in clinical practice, how can physicians’ clinical questions be translated into directions for innovative drug R&D? How can physicians truly become partners in innovative drug development?
On September 11, at the 5th Hong Kong International Biotechnology Forum & Exhibition (BIOHK 2026), DXY founder Stanley Tiantian Li delivered a presentation titled “When Doctors Become Your R&D Partners,” sharing his thoughts on these questions.
What Can We Learn from Public Data?
DXY’s Insight Database is an intelligence and analytics platform serving the global pharmaceutical industry. It covers the full drug lifecycle, from discovery to market access, tracks nearly 100,000 drug development pipelines, integrates daily updates from more than 30,000 global information sources, and provides multidimensional insights across drugs, targets, companies and indications. For the Chinese market, Insight Database provides deeper coverage, including more than 26,000 domestic R&D pipelines and over 190,000 clinical-trial records.
With the development of AI technology, DXY launched InnoPilot in China in 2026, a new AI assistant for pharmaceutical data intelligence built on Insight Database. On the InnoPilot platform, users can conduct multidimensional data and intelligence searches using natural language. InnoPilot is expected to become available internationally later in 2026.
Taking breast cancer as an example, users can ask broad questions such as “Analyse the competitive landscape of breast cancer drug development, including key strengths, gaps, emerging R&D trends and potential commercialisation pathways for new therapies,” as well as more focused questions such as “Competitive landscape of drugs for HR+/HER2-low breast cancer.”
What Questions Matter Most to Physicians?
But frontline physicians are the ones who best understand the real pain points and unmet needs in clinical practice. DXY’s unique advantage lies in having China’s largest and most active physician community. With 26 years of experience in the industry, DXY now reaches more than 90% of physicians in China, with more than 4.6 million verified licensed physicians.
Building on this, DXY is using its ClinMaster app to help physicians address common pain points and concerns in clinical practice. ClinMaster is an AI-assisted clinical decision-support tool launched by DXY in December 2025, designed exclusively for frontline clinical professionals, including physicians and pharmacists.
According to Stanley Tiantian Li, over the past nine months, ClinMaster has reached more than one million registered professional users. The platform has accumulated millions of real-world clinical questions, prescriptions and cases, with a weekly user retention rate of 80%. These real-world clinical data from the front line provide a core foundation for DXY’s identification of unmet needs.
Taking breast cancer treatment as an example, by aggregating and analysing changes in overall question trends from de-identified ClinMaster data, we found that physicians treating breast cancer are not primarily struggling with which drug to choose, but with how to sequence treatment regimens. These treatment bottlenecks further indicate that breast cancer treatment decisions have shifted from “Is there a drug?” to “How should treatments be sequenced, how should different therapies be coordinated, and how should patients be stratified?” The analysis has also yielded other high-value clinical insights.
How Can Physicians’ Needs Be Translated into R&D Guidance?
DXY brings together China’s largest and most active physician community, capturing the questions physicians ask most frequently in real-world clinical practice, alongside comprehensive global drug development data. So, can clinical pain points be communicated to R&D teams to help them identify the right areas for innovation and address unmet clinical needs? This is precisely the new direction DXY is exploring.
According to Stanley Tiantian Li, DXY is exploring ways to combine physicians’ clinical needs with its drug database. Traditional translational research moves “from the laboratory to the clinic.” What DXY is working towards is “from the clinic to the laboratory,” connecting the two to create a closed loop and enable “reverse translational research.” In this way, drug R&D teams can hear directly from frontline physicians and respond promptly to real-world needs.
The value of data does not lie in any single database, but in connecting databases across different dimensions. To this end, DXY is also exploring ways to connect different databases, linking clinical needs on the physician side with decision-making on the R&D side. In the future, DXY hopes to explore new approaches that can provide direction for drug R&D and ultimately deliver greater benefits for patients and society.
Note: All data mentioned in this article have been strictly de-identified. No personal information is included; trends are presented only through aggregation and analysis.
Disclaimer: This article is for information-sharing purposes only and does not represent the position or views of Insight. It does not constitute any investment advice, nor does it provide or recommend any treatment plans. If you require medical care, please consult a qualified healthcare provider.