🎧 Here on The ChinaHealthPulse Podcast, I chat in depth with the real experts who have dedicated years to working in and with China’s health - across policy, industry, academia and well beyond. Our candid conversations aim to provide you with real insight into how care is delivered, how decisions are made, and why it all matters, far beyond China’s borders. Watch/listen/read on Substack, on Youtube, or subscribe to the audio podcast on Spotify and Apple. It’s March 2026. Q4 2025 is done, full-year numbers are coming in, and annual reports shared through end-year earnings calls over recent weeks have set the tone for how biotech capital will move in 2026. We’re also a few weeks out from JPM 2026, where there was even more China-West biotech deal chatter than last year, if possible. Now is therefore the perfect moment to zoom out and translate the noise into a clearer map: what is emerging across deals and financings, why they’re emerging now, what a ‘global-grade’ China-origin asset really means in practice. I can think of no one with a better read on the landscape from an investment point of view, than Dr Leon Tang, one of the leading China biotech experts around, who sits closest to the investor and partnering circuits and always has his finger on the pulse. Leon brings almost two decades of experience in biomedical research, BD and investment. He is a founding partner of InScienceWeTrust BioAdvisory, a biotech business development consulting firm that focuses on pharmaceutical licensing between the East and the West, which has advised over 30 clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies, world-leading investment funds, leading public and private biotech companies, and stealth biotech startups. He is the BD head of Mianus Accelerator – a new venture that aims to help Western biotech companies to access China’s world-class first-in-human clinical development capability. He is also the co-founder of the InScienceWeTrust Community, an Asian-biotech focused non-profit, and one of the most active Asian biotech communities I know, with over 4000 active members across global hubs, including in North America and Europe. In addition, he is scientific advisor at BioSpark Group, with past lives in the venture capital and academic worlds. He holds a PhD in Biomedical sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a Master’s at Nankai University in Biochemistry, and a Bachelor’s from Tianjin University in biochemical engineering, and has published over 50 academic papers, including in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery and the Lancet Oncology. Read our Conversation: (Audio transcript adjusted for clarity and flow) 1. Setting the scene Ruby: Let’s get started by setting the frame. From your vantage point across networks and portfolios, including investors, BD teams and the wider biotech community, what feels most different right now, whether that’s compared with six months ago, a year ago or even further back? Leon: if you ask me what’s the biggest difference compared to what I saw six months ago, obviously I’m a little bit biased, always looking at a lot of stuff from the lens of Asian biotech, particularly China biotech. I would say that the overall industry, especially the Western side when they look at China, the sentiment is much more positive compared to six months ago. And if you go a little bit further back, even to one year ago, there was still debate whether embracing China was a good idea. There was an executive order rumoured from the Trump administration to ban the license deal from China to the US and so on. So that conversation and chatter is now much, much quieter today than before. In the meantime, I would that say since JP Morgan in January, there’s a lot of high profile deals and collaboration. And the headlines announced really embrace the China biotech as an essential part of the global R &D ecosystem - through the deal making, through R &D collaboration, even through high profile big pharma executive visits. So I think that would be the biggest difference: the sentiment and also the action with China biotech is much more positive compared to six months ago and much, much better compared to one year ago. Ruby: And in terms of the recent end-year summaries from industry across biopharma, especially for those with China cash flows or China pipelines or cross-border ambitions, what have been the real questions for you underneath those very optimistic announcements, whether that’s real capital or real partnerships; opportunities and risks, things like that. Leon: In terms of cash flow, think there are very few China originated drugs probably except for Zanubrutinib (Brukinsa) from BeiGene/Beone, and Carvykti (Cilta-cel) from Legend Biotech, who are making profit for Western companies. But most of others were only recently approved, and have not really reported revenue from the Western companies’ earning calls yet. I’m probably more focused on the deal making front, licensing deal or R &D collaborations. For dealmakers, there are always two parts. One part is really for your balance sheet or for your CapEx/upfront payment, and then the milestones, everything biobucks (contingent, milestone-based payments in biotechnology licensing or acquisition deals between large pharma and smaller biotech firms), that’s a different category, which is really important for the Chinese biotechs to talk to their investors, but not necessarily have an immediate impact with the earning calls every quarter. So focusing upfront payments, think if you look at all the deals since the beginning of 2026, the momentum suggests that this year can be bigger than 2025, which was already record breaking year in upfront payments. Biobucks has the same story. Last year, the global BD&L (business development and licensing), the licensed pharmaceutical space, China to West deals contributed to about 49% - about half the total deal value. As a comparison, in 2024, the United States were contributing about 50%, I think 47%. So from 2024 to 2025, the leader in licensing deals changed from United States to China. If you just look in the first two months of 2026 number already, China going to be dominant. It’s pretty clear. it continues. 2. Deal trends: Part 1 Ruby: In the pharmaceutical licenses you just mentioned, the big headline grabbing China-West partnership announcements that we’ve seen over the previous years, and then the burst of attention around January in San Francisco at JPM. In terms of organising the landscape then, what have been key patterns you’ve noticed in assets? any surprises or revisions in terms of modality, whether that’s ADCs versus bi-specifics, or clinical versus pre-clinical stage or buyer type - large foreign MNCs versus funds or other biotechs or even in structures for co-development or M&A, what they’re telling you about demand and innovation progress or pace and talent, or perceptions versus reality? Leon: This is probably gonna take two hours to answer to really give you a little bit of a reasonable description, so I have to force myself to three. The first one I would say is diversity. So the China-to-West deal right now is diversifying away from previously, which pretty much mainly focused on oncology licensing deals. Two years ago, that was pretty much the majority of them. But today is really different. Diversification in terms of disease area. Yes, oncology is likely still number one, probably not far ahead of immunology, if you look at recent deals in the first two months of 2026 . And also obesity is catching up real quick. The format of deals are also diversifying quite a bit: if you go back three years ago, most of the deals would be straightforward license deals. Right now it has so many different flavours (except for straightforward large ticket M&A, which is still not happening very often). Everything else is very similar to what you would say. You have a typical license deal with a preclinical phase one, phase two, phase three assay. Actually this week, Pfizer’s licensed a commercial-ready product from the China biotech Hangzhou Sciwind Biosciences,and I just saw the news that that asset was approved in China, shortly after the deal was closed. So right now Pfizer is a commercial obesity company. So they have a commercial product on the market as of today, because they licensed a late stage asset (Ecnoglutide, a GLP-1 drug) from China. But of course this asset was only approved for Chinese market. So that’s a new development: big Pharma licensed a late-stage asset only for China market! That’s one diversification. Another is: there’s a deal which even with the US biotech companies, rarely happens. Eli Lilly had a deal with Innovent, which is arguably the number one biotech based in China now, by market cap, because BeOne, or what used to be called Beigene, has become a Swiss company. So Innovent has become number one. Innovent and Lilly’s deal: if you look at it, there’s no asset transaction, but upfront payments of $350 million with up to more than $8 billion biobucks - one of the largest deal in 2026. And there were no asset transactions involved. What Eli Lilly really got from this $350 million down payment, is really to have the option to co-develop drugs from target nominations until phase two with Innovent, in oncology and immunology. So what Eli Lilly got is not a specific asset, but Innovent’s capability to develop drugs in immunology and oncology. And a similar situation also happened in the largest deal on record as of today, between CSPC and AstraZeneca. That deal, the first half probably involves four assets in obesity, and the other half is the option to develop another four obesity assets they don’t even have yet. And that deal costs AstraZeneca over $1 billion upfront payment, up to $18.5 billion total value. It’s the largest deal out of China. So those also showed the diversification, also the confidence
