Big Pharma’s China Deal Wave & 12 Companies on Our Radar

In DealForma’s figures cited by CEO Chris Dokomajilar, deal flow between large-cap biopharma and Chinese biopharma accelerated in 2024-2025. In 2025, big pharma completed 18 in-licensing and asset purchase deals (just one in 2020) from Chinese companies with $50M+ upfronts, totaling $57.3B in deal value and $3.9B in upfront cash and equity. By 2026, China continues to emerge as a major source of globally licensable, clinical-stage biotech assets, backed by an increasingly complete innovation stack, even as new policy constraints complicate cross-border data flows and outsourcing.

In late January, speaking at the Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong, executives from Merck and Amgen pointed to China as a likely early approval market for fully AI-designed drugs. Merck China president Marc Horn suggested that 2026 could mark the shift from AI-assisted discovery to compounds designed end-to-end by AI entering regulatory pipelines, citing China’s patient datasets, clinical execution, and the government’s recent “AI Plus” policy push. Amgen’s chief medical officer Paul Burton pointed to a similar timeline, seeing 2026 as a year when AI-driven and human genetics–led discovery could begin translating more directly into drug candidates.

Number of clinical trials by country, 2023-2025; WHO

For perspective, among recent big pharma deals involving Chinese companies, this year’s JPM week had AbbVie’s $5.6B partnership with RemeGen around a bispecific oncology asset. Looking back at just 2025, Pfizer licensed a bispecific from 3SBio with $1.25B upfront, AstraZeneca entered a multi-year $5.3B AI-enabled small-molecule discovery collaboration with CSPC Pharmaceuticals, and GSK’s x Jiangsu Hengrui agreements included $500M upfront and up to about $12B in potential milestones.

From Generics to Innovation

China’s life-science trajectory pairs applied experience with a late and unstable buildup of modern research institutions. In the early PRC period, the sector followed Soviet-style organizational models and was later disrupted by ideological campaigns like Lysenkoism, leaving lasting gaps in research and education. After 1978, the Four Modernizations re-established STEM as a national priority. Biotechnology was formally elevated under the 863 Plan in 1986, whereas special economic zones (SEZs) in the early 1980s attracted foreign capital and technology, enhancing scalable pharmaceutical manufacturing, mostly of generic compounds. Shenzhen, one of the first SEZs, initially scaled through processing trade before local policy emphasis shifted toward higher-tech and innovation-driven sectors.

A related lens comes from Cam Watson’s recent ‘bioelectric tech stack’ essay in Decoding Bio, which asks why China appears to have produced more profitable biomanufacturing firms while the West has accumulated stalled pilots, despite comparable scientific capability. Watson argues the gap is often infrastructural, and maps ‘touch points’ from feedstocks and fermentation through sensing and control that can make biological production more repeatable at scale.

After China’s reform and opening-up, multinational pharmaceutical companies rapidly localized their operations by building manufacturing sites in China and outsourcing parts of production, which helped Chinese firms begin taking on contracts for APIs and intermediates while also benefiting from technology spillovers such as GMP standards, quality systems, and improved production processes. Major examples include Pfizer (entered in 1989, first plant in Dalian), J&J (entered in 1985 and formed the Xi’an Janssen joint venture), and MSD (set up its China HQ in 1992 and later invested heavily in R&D and manufacturing). This environment also supported the rise of domestic CRO/CDMO leaders like WuXi AppTec, founded in 2000, which initially focused on chemical synthesis and small-molecule intermediates and later strengthened the industry’s credibility by listing on the NYSE in 2007.

The transition from generics and manufacturing scale toward innovative drug development happened through targeted policy interventions. The 2008 New Drug Creation and Development program marked the first large-scale public financing of domestic drug R&D. Regulatory credibility strengthened after the 2015 overhaul of China’s drug approval system, when the regulator (CFDA) required self-audits of clinical trial data for 1,622 pending applications, triggering a wave of withdrawals and signaling a tougher, more credible review standard. Subsequent initiatives like Made in China 2025, Healthy China 2030, and China’s accession to the ICH in 2017, further aligned the sector with international standards. While DeepSeek is often cited as evidence of domestic AI engineering depth, the same systems-level capabilities increasingly support clinical development, manufacturing quality, and regulatory execution.

Five Growth Stats

• China’s biopharma can recruit patients for Phase I trials roughly twice faster compared to the US. At the same time, approval timelines for first-in-human studies have been dramatically reduced—from 501 days to just 87 after China’s drug regulator quadrupled its workforce between 2015 and 2018.
• According to the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), China has registered nearly twice as many clinical trials as the US since 2023—48,656 versus 25,022.
• Bloomberg (based on Norstella’s data) reports China’s contribution to the global innovative-drug pipeline rose from 160 compounds in 2015 to over 1,250 in 2024, approaching the US’s ~1,440.
• According to a recent BCG report/GlobalData numbers, the share of global licensing deal value originating from Chinese companies rose from 5% in 2019 to 48% in 2025, while the US stake fell from 55% to 29%
• Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Science City is often called China’s ‘Pharma Valley’ and by now has hosted over 1,700 biomedical companies since 1992, including operations from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Roche, Eli Lilly, Novartis, GSK, and J&J.