BeOne Medicines Brand Guidelines: BeiGene 2010, Brukinsa & a 2025 Move to Basel

An American entrepreneur, a Beijing scientist and a 2010 start.

BeOne Medicines began life as BeiGene, founded in late 2010 by John V. Oyler, an American entrepreneur who is still its chairman and chief executive, and Xiaodong Wang, a Chinese American biochemist who directs the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, according to English Wikipedia. The company says the two set out to build a global company to transform cancer treatment. Wikipedia places its first offices in Philadelphia and at the Zhongguancun Life Science Park in Beijing, near Wang’s institute.

Its early backer was a German drugmaker: the company’s own history says Merck KGaA of Darmstadt provided early backing in 2011 as the first external investment and supported its early pipeline and research in 2012. English Wikipedia instead names the American company Merck & Co., so the two sources differ. Wikipedia describes an early business model of licensing experimental medicines shelved by other drugmakers and testing them at Chinese hospitals.

In 2012, the company says, its chemists began programmes against two cancer targets, PD-1 and BTK. One compound, BGB-3111, was, by the company’s account, the 3,111th molecule it had synthesised in two years; it became zanubrutinib. Between 2013 and 2015 its first compounds entered clinical trials in Australia, where, Wikipedia says, its first-in-human studies are still run.

BeiGene listed on the Nasdaq in February 2016 under the ticker BGNE, added a Hong Kong listing in August 2018 and, on 15 December 2021, a listing on the Shanghai STAR Market, which the company says made it the first biotech listed on all three exchanges at once. In 2017 it signed a partnership with Celgene over its PD-1 antibody tislelizumab; after Bristol-Myers Squibb agreed to buy Celgene, the rights came back to BeiGene in 2019, Wikipedia says. Amgen took a 20.5% stake in 2019 and joined the board.

Brukinsa, Tevimbra and three plants.

Two medicines carry the company. Brukinsa (zanubrutinib), a BTK inhibitor for blood cancers, received accelerated approval from the U.S. FDA in November 2019 for mantle cell lymphoma; English Wikipedia, citing Reuters and Bloomberg, calls it the first cancer drug developed in China to gain FDA approval. Wikipedia lists later approvals in China in June 2020, for Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia in the United States in September 2021, and for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia in the European Union in November 2022 and the United States in January 2023.

Tevimbra (tislelizumab), a PD-1 antibody, was first approved in China in December 2019, for Hodgkin lymphoma, according to Wikipedia. The rights passed to Novartis in 2021 and returned in September 2023, the company says, and, Wikipedia says, the FDA approved Tevimbra in 2024 for a form of gastric cancer, in combination with chemotherapy. The company says it has three internally developed medicines, approved in more than 75 countries.

BeOne makes much of its own supply. It describes three company sites: a small-molecule plant in Suzhou for tablets and capsules; a biologics and antibody-drug-conjugate campus in Guangzhou; and a biologics manufacturing and clinical research centre on the Princeton West Innovation Campus in Hopewell, New Jersey, a 42-acre site where it broke ground in 2022 and which opened in 2024. European Pharmaceutical Review dated the Hopewell opening to July 2024. These descriptions are the company’s own.

The company also has a Bay Area office in San Carlos, California, after what its history calls a consolidation of its California offices in 2025, and an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its history page says it reached about 12,000 employees across six continents in 2025.

How biotech presents itself.

Biotechnology companies sell things that are almost impossible to photograph. A medicine made from a strand of RNA or an engineered antibody has no shape a camera can see, so the sector leans on a small set of stand-in images: rendered molecules, ribbons and double helices, antibodies drawn as glowing Y-shapes, and close-ups of cells under a microscope. These macro images carry most of the visual weight on corporate websites, investor decks and annual reports.

The second familiar picture is the laboratory itself. Scientists at benches with pipettes, racks of sample tubes and gloved hands over a plate reader appear again and again, because they show work in progress rather than a finished product. Alongside them sit patient-advocacy portraits: people living with a rare disease, their families and the groups that represent them, photographed in everyday settings rather than in the clinic.

Architecture does the rest. Glass-fronted lab campuses in clusters such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, Copenhagen and South San Francisco stand in for scale and ambition, and company websites often show their buildings alongside their people. The calendar adds its own stage: the BIO International Convention and the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held each January in San Francisco, are where pipelines are presented to partners and investors.

Within that common language, names and colours do much of the work of telling companies apart. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, where it is based, what it makes and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. No product, logo or pack is reproduced, and the palettes are our own unofficial interpretation.

A power button, tilted.

On 14 November 2024 BeiGene announced that it planned to rename itself BeOne Medicines. European Pharmaceutical Review reported the next day how the company explained the new logo: “Be” stands for being disease free and “One” for a shared mission to overcome cancer; the letters “Onc,” for oncology, are picked out in red inside “One”; a power-button symbol stands for an “always on” search for treatments that turn cancer off; and the button is tilted because, the company said, the path of science is not always straightforward. In January 2025 the Nasdaq ticker changed from BGNE to ONC.

The rename came with a move. On 28 May 2025 the Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA, published by swissinfo.ch, reported that the company was moving its legal headquarters from the Cayman Islands to Basel and was now officially called BeOne Medicines. The report said the company, until then based in Cambridge in the United States and in Beijing, had set up in Basel in 2018 with three employees, opened its European headquarters there four years later and had grown that office to 265 people; the company’s own timeline dates its first Swiss office to 2017. Basel Area Business & Innovation, the regional promotion agency, welcomed the redomiciliation on 27 May 2025.

There is also a dispute on record. VitalLaw reported on 18 May 2026 that a federal court in Illinois had allowed trade-secret claims brought by AbbVie against the company, filed when it was still named BeiGene, to proceed; that ruling let the case go forward and was not a finding on the claims.

For a design guide, BeOne Medicines shows a company spelling its purpose into its own name, with a single red syllable doing the work. Compare Amgen, which took a stake in BeiGene in 2019, and Novartis, its Basel neighbour and former partner on tislelizumab. For this guide we use a midnight slate, a red and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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