Despite a year of trade tensions, national security strictures and stark warnings about the U.S.’ waning biotech innovation edge, the fact remains that China is and will likely continue to be a prominent source of innovation for the life sciences industry.
Meanwhile, swirling geopolitical pressures and threatened policy changes did little to abate the pace of China biotech acquisition and licensing deals in 2025, and the cumulative value of those accords has never been higher, Mark Lansdell, director, asset and portfolio strategy practice lead at Evaluate, noted in an interview with Fierce Biotech.
“We’re going to end up in a very similar place to 2024 in terms of the volume of deals,” Lansdell told Fierce in early December.
At the time of the interview, Evaluate had tallied 142 China deals of all types—including licensings, acquisitions and financings—in 2025, according to Lansdell. That marked a slight uptick from the 134 China deals booked in 2024, while remaining largely on par with the volume of overall deals in 2023, he said. In 2022, meanwhile, industry deals with China biotechs reached a high point at 167 agreements for the year.
Several more deals have since rolled through in December, such as Bristol Myers Squibb's $1.1 billion research pact with Shanghai’s Harbour BioMed, Yarrow Bioscience’s $1.37 billion bid for ex-China rights to a potential first-in-class antibody candidate from a subsidiary of GenSci Pharmaceutical and Formation Bio’s $600 million deal for ex-China rights to a next-gen immunology asset from Lynk Pharmaceuticals.
Meanwhile, just this week, AstraZeneca floated $100 million upfront—plus up to $1.91 billion into potential milestones, as well as royalties—for the rights to a clinical-stage, multitarget asset from China's Jacobio Pharma, while Ipsen waded deeper into the antibody-drug conjugate arena with a deal worth up to $1.06 billion for Simcere Zaiming's SIM0613, which targets a protein highly expressed on a range of tumor types and cancer-associated fibroblasts. Simcere Zaiming is headquartered in Nanjing.
Crunching numbers with Evaluate
For much of the conversation with Fierce, Evaluate’s Lansdell narrowed his focus to licensing and acquisition deals with China-based firms, where similar volume trends have played out in recent years.
The pace of deals being struck with Chinese biotechs is “pretty much holding steady” in the present, Lansdell added, noting that he expects that “to continue into 2026.”
“I think the interesting thing is value,” he stressed, “because that is where there has been some movement.”
Comparing the scope of the deals struck with China biotechs in recent years, the aggregate deal value of 131 licensing or acquisition deals in 2022 was $32.2 billion, Lansdell noted. The total value of those types of deals with China biotechs rose slightly to $35.2 billion in 2023. Then there was then a big jump in 2024 when the total value rose to $51.9 billion. With a month still left to go, the tally was sitting at $92.2 billion in 2025 when Lansdell spoke with Fierce in early December.
Lansdell did, however, give the caveat that those figures represent the total potential value of the deals logged—and not necessarily their final realized value.
While there have been some “individually very big deals that you perhaps wouldn’t have expected to see three or four years ago,” the “average value has also risen,” Lansdell said, noting that the trend isn’t being driven exclusively by a few high-spending outliers.
For context, he noted that the average total potential deal value of pacts with China biotechs in 2022 stood at about $546 million, compared to a “threefold shift” to $1.5 billion in 2025.
For an example of a deal trading in that general vicinity, Pfizer hopped onboard the PD-1xVEGF train in May when it handed 3SBio $1.25 billion upfront for ex-China rights to a clinical candidate that puts it in competition with Merck & Co., BioNTech and Summit Therapeutics. As part of the deal, Pfizer has also pledged up to $4.8 billion in milestones for ex-China rights to the drug, coded SSGJ-70. Pfizer is in addition investing $100 million in the China biotech and will pay double-digit royalties on sales of the asset, if approved.
Separately, Japan's Takeda in October fronted Innovent Biologics $1.2 billion for rights to two cancer assets, tucking in the potential promise of a whopping $10.2 billion in milestones. The Innovent assets, IBI363 and IBI343, have shown promise in treating patients with certain solid tumors.
The interplay between volume of deals and total deal values also holds true when looking at the proportion of value coming from industry accords focused on China, Lansdell noted.
Whereas China licensing and acquisition agreements constituted some 9% of the total value of industry deals in 2022, that figure had risen substantially to 21% by the end of November 2025.
“That is becoming quite significant,” Lansdell said.
Lansdell explained that much of the value of those deals is backloaded into potential milestones and royalties, with the lower relative value of the upfront payments both "pretty attractive" for the dealmakers and potentially signaling a certain degree of prudence when striking deals with China biotechs.
"There's not that overexuberance there in the way that there is for the potential total deal values," Lansdell said, referring to the upfront payments in the deals Evaluate tallied.
At this point, China’s R&D output is likely too prolific to ignore, said Lansdell, who noted that companies—especially those playing in modalities like ADCs, bispecifics or cell therapies—“would actively need to be looking away from China” to avoid striking deals with biotechs there.
“China has been very smart in picking the right modalities, the right disease and therapy areas,” Landsell pointed out.
The lay of the land
Lansdell is far from the only industry watcher to highlight China’s growing influence on the innovative biopharma landscape.
Back in July, analysts at Jefferies noted that in the first three months of 2025, 32% of outlicensing biotech deal value stemmed from China, versus 21% reported in both 2024 and 2023.
“We believe China biotechs are reshaping the U.S. biopharma landscape, as in-licensing assets from China could offer multinational corporations a remedy to alleviate pressure affordably and within a manageable time frame,” the analysts wrote in a note to clients this summer.
Still, not everyone feels comfortable with China's increasing sway in the industry, with PwC analysts warning earlier this year that the swift evolution of the country’s biotech sector has created “heightened risks related to IP security, regulatory compliance and strategic alignment.”
While near-term prospects for China biotech M&A remained “robust” at 2025’s midyear mark, according to PwC, the professional services group warned that emerging “multifaceted regulatory and geopolitical set of challenges” meant companies need “comprehensive due diligence and strategic foresight” in their dealmaking.
“The sector’s focus remains on bespoke bolt-on deals to strategically strengthen innovation pipelines amid an increasingly complex regulatory environment,” Roel van den Akker, U.S. pharma and life sciences deals leader at PwC, said in a statement at the time.
Adding another potential wrinkle to the industry’s work with China is the Biosecure Act, a piece of China-targeting national security legislation that failed to make the cut in 2024 but recently passed through both the House and Senate as part of the U.S. annual defense spending bill.
In essence, the legislation prevents executive U.S. agencies from working with “biotechnology companies of concern” for equipment or services and, critically, the prohibition extends to federal contracts with drugmakers that would involve using equipment and services from those targeted companies.
That said, the bill has been defanged in many ways from the original incarnation introduced in early 2024. Whereas the previous draft named five companies directly—sparking backlash—the new bill changes the approach by tapping the Office of Management and Budget with coming up with a list of relevant companies "of concern" while also utilizing the Pentagon's Section 1260H list of firms associated with the Chinese military.
In a sit-down with Fierce Biotech this past fall, Paul Hastings, CEO of Nkarta and former chair of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, acknowledged the importance of measures to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign countries like Biosecure.
But, at the same time, in terms of innovation coming out of China, Hastings urged the federal government to “let that one go.”
“We can then make that innovation U.S.-led,” Hastings told Fierce in October. “Because when you license something, it becomes yours.
“Don't punish someone because they've licensed a Chinese asset,” Hastings continued.