PhytoHealth President Yi-Ling Lee is entering her tenth year of carrying on her father's business, and this year she was named one of Taiwan's Ten Outstanding Young Women. What outsiders see is the halo of succession; what few know is the effort she has put into transforming and upgrading the botanical new drug business.

For a second-generation entrepreneur without a medical or pharmaceutical background, taking on the extremely difficult business of botanical new drugs, of which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved only four to date, how much conviction does it take? 

In 2017, Yi-Ling Lee returned to the Maywufa Group founded by her father, Cheng-Chia Lee, starting with project execution in the pharmaceutical business, and formally took up the post of PhytoHealth President in 2021. PhytoHealth, part of the Maywufa Group, was founded in 1998 and focuses on botanical new drugs, yet the U.S. FDA did not formally issue its Botanical Drug guidance until 2004. One can imagine how hard it was for PhytoHealth back then, blazing a trail in this non-mainstream market.

In 2010, PG2 (懷特血寶) received the first botanical new drug license issued in Taiwan. Extracted from the Chinese herb Astragalus, it treats cancer-related fatigue by strengthening immunity. "Cancer-related fatigue has long been regarded as an inevitable part of cancer treatment, so it is often overlooked." The reality Lee describes is reflected in how difficult it was to promote the drug after its launch. In the year before she joined the Group, PG2 had been licensed for five years, yet PhytoHealth's revenue was only a little over NT$20 million. Breaking through market perceptions was her first priority.

Although Yi-Ling Lee did not major in medicine or pharmacy, she is not a complete outsider either. A graduate of Taipei First Girls' High School and the Department of Accounting at National Taiwan University, with a master's in business from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, she was a typical top business student. After her master's, she had many options in finance, technology, and venture capital. But perhaps influenced by her father, she chose to join the Taiwan branch of Janssen Pharmaceuticals, part of Johnson & Johnson, starting as a frontline sales representative who had to visit at least seven physicians a day. "Many people think I entered this industry in order to take over the business, but it was actually because life sciences gave me the fulfillment of helping people,"

Lee says. She describes it as an experience of "learning from zero." "For nearly 13 years, I moved from one consulting room to another, carrying out all kinds of projects and handling complex medical information." From clinical trials and regulations to the new drug development process, and on to how drugs reach medical institutions and what patients need downstream, Lee spent a great deal of time learning all over again, building her professional moat on her own two feet. 

By 2017 she was a senior marketing and sales manager at Janssen. "At that time I had married and had children and reached a turning point in my life, and my father said I might as well come back and see if I could help." This turn brought Lee almost back to learning from zero once again: the culture shock of going from a major international pharmaceutical company to a local new drug company, from all kinds of mainstream Western medicines to the unfamiliar territory of botanical new drugs. Where she had previously focused on sales, back at PhytoHealth she had to cover everything, from clinical development and manufacturing to all post-launch strategy.

"The biggest challenge along the way has not been product development itself, but market education and building medical consensus."

As soon as she returned to PhytoHealth, Lee applied what she had learned in big-pharma marketing. Her first priority was to help patients and physicians truly understand that moderate to severe cancer-related fatigue not only affects patients' quality of life but may also reduce their willingness and ability to tolerate treatment. In 2017, Lee first actively pushed for collaboration with the Taiwan Society of Cancer Palliative Medicine to compile the "Clinical Practice Guidelines for Cancer-Related Fatigue," and then worked to have PG2 included in National Health Insurance coverage.

Today, both efforts have made great progress. The guidelines have established a set of objective assessment and management guidelines for cancer-related fatigue, and the education and outreach events held each year draw more than ten thousand healthcare professionals. In 2021, PG2 was formally included in National Health Insurance reimbursement, and after its launch a large Phase 4 clinical study lasting six years was also carried out, with the positive results shown to the world through publication in international journals. Looking back, simply winning National Health Insurance reimbursement was a major undertaking in itself.

Lee recalls: "When we applied for National Health Insurance reimbursement, because there was no comparator benchmark for a new drug for cancer-related fatigue, assessing the impact on the insurance budget went back and forth countless times." She admits that from compiling the guidelines to gaining coverage, every hurdle was full of setbacks, but because of that, "I built my confidence between the setbacks and overcoming the difficulties." 

Cheng-Chia Lee says of Yi-Ling Lee: "She has been very conscientious ever since she was little. When something comes up, she first thinks through the direction clearly, then sets short-, medium-, and long-term goals step by step and completes them methodically." In 1984, Cheng-Chia Lee was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons; 42 years later, in 2026, Yi-Ling Lee was named one of Taiwan's Ten Outstanding Young Women. On the day of the interview with Yi-Ling Lee, Cheng-Chia Lee left the office after a brief greeting, and it was clear that he fully lets his daughter take the lead.

Yi-Ling Lee describes herself as a creative "I person" (introvert). She is the second daughter in the family. Her elder sister, Yi-Li Lee, returned to the Group many years before her and is also an outstanding woman leader, mainly in charge of the Group's consumer goods and high-end medical device businesses. The sisters are close and exchange ideas about management with each other. 

Yi-Ling Lee's husband, Huang Po-Hao, is a renowned neurosurgeon at National Taiwan University Hospital and currently also serves as CEO of its International Medical Service Center. One patient describes him as "superbly skilled, humble, and extremely dedicated, visiting the wards almost every Sunday." Both are extremely busy at work and have two young children at home. How do they balance family and work? Lee says the two of them are considerate of and support each other. For example, they coordinate their business entertaining with each other or move it to lunchtime. "I give my all on both tracks, family and career. Taking care of the family is very important; it is what gives me the confidence to go all out."

The reality at hand, however, is that PhytoHealth has yet to turn a profit. To this, Lee says confidently: "In bringing botanical drugs to market and commercializing them, PhytoHealth has been at the very front. We have truly invested a great deal along the way and built a high barrier. People ask me whether there will be generics of PG2 in the next five to ten years. No! Because the barrier is very high and substitutability is very low." She says the hardest part of botanical drugs is uniformity starting from the plant variety itself, with every batch of natural material having to meet the same specifications, which is why the United States has issued only four botanical new drug licenses. "These next few years will be when we slowly begin to reap the returns."

For her next step, in addition to deepening the clinical value of the drugs, Lee's top priority is to generate spillover benefits from PG2 and Tong Bao (oral analgesic capsules), both of which have Taiwan drug licenses. One direction is to extend from drugs into wellness: starting from the cancer-related fatigue drug, the company is developing post-illness health supplements to build a complete care landscape from disease treatment to health management. The other is to expand the overseas footprint of its drugs. For example, preparation of registration dossiers for Tong Bao has begun in Germany, and regulatory consultation and registration preparation are under way in Southeast Asia.

Although Yi-Ling Lee was not trained in medicine or pharmacy, she grew up in the environment of her father's entrepreneurship and developed a spirit of taking on challenges. Cheng-Chia Lee, the Outstanding Young Person of years past, laid the foundation for Taiwan's first listed botanical new drug company; Yi-Ling Lee, today's Outstanding Young Woman, intends to open up an even broader road for botanical new drugs.

Profile: Yi-Ling Lee
Born: 1980
Current position: Vice Chairman and President, PhytoHealth Corporation
Experience: Senior Marketing and Sales Manager, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (Johnson & Johnson); Risk Management Consultant, Deloitte
Education: Master's in business, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Department of Accounting, National Taiwan University

Original source: Wealth Magazine: Taking On Her Father Cheng-Chia Lee's Toughest Business! Yi-Ling Lee's 10-Year Push in Botanical New Drugs Earns Her a Place Among the Ten Outstanding Young Women