Coherus Brand Guidelines: A 2010 Biosimilar Start, Three Sales & a 2025 Oncology Rename

A biosimilar company by design.

Coherus began in 2010 as a company built around biosimilars. Its website says Denny Lanfear “founded Coherus in 2010,” after decades in the biopharmaceutical industry, “with the vision of improving the public’s access to high-quality, life-changing medicines”; he remains president, chief executive and chairman. The market-research firm GlobalData also gives 2010 as the founding year and places the head office in Redwood City, California, on the San Francisco Peninsula. Its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker CHRS.

For most of its life the company was called Coherus BioSciences, and it built a portfolio of three biosimilars sold under their own brand names in the United States: Udenyca, a pegfilgrastim; Yusimry, an adalimumab referencing AbbVie’s Humira, which Pharmaceutical Technology says was first approved in 2021; and Cimerli, a ranibizumab referencing Roche’s Lucentis, used in retinal disease.

In 2025 the name changed. A company release dated 30 May 2025 announced that Coherus BioSciences had become Coherus Oncology, Inc., “to better align with its exclusive focus on proprietary innovative immuno-oncology medicines.” The ticker stayed the same. Before Coherus, its website says, Lanfear had founded two other companies: Saronyx, a drug-development software services business, and the biopharmaceutical company InteKrin Therapeutics.

Three sales in just over a year.

The turn from biosimilars to oncology was made by selling each product line in turn. The first to go was the eye-care business. On 5 March 2024 Ophthalmology Times reported that Coherus had completed the divestiture of its Cimerli franchise by selling its subsidiary Coherus Ophthalmology LLC to Sandoz; the sale included the product’s licence application, its ophthalmology sales team, some field reimbursement staff and access to proprietary commercial software.

The second was Yusimry. On 28 June 2024 Pharmaceutical Technology reported that Coherus had sold the adalimumab biosimilar to Hong Kong King-Friend Industrial, whose US subsidiary, Meitheal Pharmaceuticals, would hold the exclusive US commercial rights. The magazine described the sale as part of Coherus’s plan to become a company focused only on oncology. The buyer had been building a biologics business of its own: in September 2023, the magazine said, Meitheal had acquired the US rights to three insulin biosimilars from China’s Tonghua Dongbao Pharmaceutical, and it planned paediatric presentations and a high-concentration formulation of Yusimry.

The third was Udenyca, its pegfilgrastim biosimilar. On 15 April 2025 Pharmaceutical Technology reported that Coherus had completed the sale of the Udenyca franchise to Intas Pharmaceuticals of India, under an asset purchase agreement the two had signed in December 2024. Intas took the prefilled syringe, the autoinjector and the on-body presentation, and its US specialty division, Accord BioPharma, took over responsibility for the franchise in the United States; key Coherus staff in marketing, sales, supply chain, finance, quality and manufacturing moved to Accord, the magazine reported. Lanfear said the company had “transformed” itself.

With that sale the biosimilar business that gave Coherus its first identity had passed in full to other companies — Sandoz, Hong Kong King-Friend and Intas — in just over a year.

Design and documentation.

Biosimilar makers sell medicines that most people only ever meet as a pack in a pharmacy or a hospital ward, so their public image is built from the places where those medicines are made. Their websites and reports favour gleaming steel bioreactors, vials moving along blue-lit filling lines, scientists in gowns and hoods, and close-ups of prefilled syringes and autoinjector pens. The pictures signal scale and control rather than any single product.

The category is young. The European Medicines Agency’s record shows that the marketing authorisation for Celltrion’s Remsima, a biosimilar of the antibody infliximab, was issued on 10 September 2013, and English Wikipedia describes it as the first biosimilar monoclonal antibody approved by the EMA. Since then a group of companies in Asia, Europe and North America has built ranges of biosimilars, each sold under a brand name of its own, alongside the corporate names covered in this guide.

Their messaging leans on access. Celltrion states a mission of “a healthier tomorrow where no patients are left untreated”; Samsung Bioepis says it makes “quality-assured biologic medicines more accessible, more quickly.” Celltrion’s brand page ties its green to trust. Trade meetings such as the GRx+Biosims conference and the BIO International Convention are where the sector’s companies present their pipelines and meet partners.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and which approvals and deals dated sources record — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From copies of biologics to immunotherapy.

The product that anchors the new company is LOQTORZI, the PD-1 antibody toripalimab-tpzi. CancerNetwork reported on 27 October 2023 that the FDA had approved it for nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a cancer of the upper throat, according to a press release from Coherus and Shanghai Junshi Biosciences, its Chinese partner. The Coherus website now presents LOQTORZI alongside two investigational antibodies, tagmokitug, aimed at CCR8, and casdozokitug, aimed at IL-27, and describes its goal as combination therapies against immune resistance in cancer. GlobalData’s company profile lists casdozokitug as an investigational IgG1 antibody in hepatocellular carcinoma and tagmokitug as an anti-CCR8 antibody studied in several tumour types, including colorectal, gastric and head and neck cancers.

The 30 May 2025 release put scientists rather than products at the front. It quoted a board member, Jill O’Donnell-Tormey, a senior adviser to the Cancer Research Institute, on the promise of combination therapies, and the chief scientific and development officer, Theresa LaVallee, on the aim “to set new standards of cancer care with novel combinations.” Its leadership page lists an executive team that includes a chief medical officer, a chief commercial officer and a chief strategy and corporate affairs officer, with Lanfear at its head.

The renaming shows in the brand. The website, its footer and its copyright line now read “Coherus Oncology,” and its menus lead with oncology focus, pipeline and clinical trials rather than the biosimilar portfolio. The company still says its team has “consistently delivered strong execution for over a decade” — a history that, in its earlier years, was a biosimilar one.

That gives Coherus an unusual place among the makers in this guide. It is included for the biosimilars it built and sold; it no longer makes or sells them, and the Udenyca, Yusimry and Cimerli names now belong to Intas, Hong Kong King-Friend and Sandoz.

For a design guide, Coherus shows how a single company name can be carried from one field into another by adding one word. Compare Sandoz, which bought its eye-care franchise, and Celltrion, a company that has stayed with biosimilars. For this guide we use a plum, a blush and a terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Coherus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.