Serving returns

China's Ally Bridge Group hit the investment world's radar in 2015 with its audacious move to take CRO WuXi PharmaTech Inc. private. If the firm and its partners can engineer the first fruits of that move with the listing of WuXi's biologics unit in Hong Kong this year, the question is what will be its next moves to generate outsized returns for its investors.

Ally Bridge, which has about $1.5 billion under management across three funds and an international base of LPs, thinks its returns and continued visibility will come from a handful of public and private portfolio companies with transformative data events, the first of which should come this half. ...