As one of the founding execs and longtime chief medical officer at Betta Pharma, Fenlai Tan isn’t just well aware of the allure of a me-better strategy in China. He helped create it. Over the past 11 years, the biotech — which took its name for the vocal resemblance to “better” — had accrued a whopping $9.2 billion valuation (RMB$60 billion) thanks to a single drug: icotinib, a first-generation EGFR inhibitor that became China’s first approved targeted therapy after proving just as effective as AstraZeneca’s Iressa in a head-to-head trial, and safer for Chinese patients. Tan’s new ambitions, though, go...