“Europe has a market that doesn’t work for pharmaceuticals.”
Daniel Rankin
“China is clearly so much faster at developing a molecule than us.”
Malin Jonsson Boezelman
At NLSDays 2026 in Stockholm, the super session “The New Global Dealmaking Map: China’s Innovation Surge and the Future of Biopharma Partnerships” brought together Daniel Chancellor, VP Thought Leadership at Norstella, who moderated; Malin Jonsson Boezelman, Senior Director of Business Development and Licensing at AstraZeneca; Simon Regnell, Associate Global Evaluation Director at Novo Nordisk; Frances Stocks Allen, Partner at Cooley; Daniel Rankin, Head of Strategy and Corporate Development at Sobi; and Toby Richardson, Senior Director of External Scientific Innovation for Johnson & Johnson EMEA.
The panel examined how China’s rapid rise as an innovation source is reshaping cross-border licensing, financing, and partnership strategy, and what it means for Nordic and European biotech trying to compete.
China Is No Longer the Bargain Bin
The panel agreed that the “cheap China deal” era is ending. Frances said Cooley’s own tracking of publicly disclosed deals showed average upfront value for China licensing deals roughly doubling in the first two months of this year compared to the same period in 2025 (though the figure is hard to pin down precisely, since many early-stage deals go unannounced). She pointed to Aiolos Bio’s 2023 license of an asthma antibody from Hengrui, followed five months later by GSK’s acquisition of Aiolos for up to $1.4 billion, as the kind of “cheap-asset-flip” story that’s becoming harder to repeat as prices catch up.
Simon said that doing business in China is “not about finding bargains anymore; it’s about really finding world-class differentiated assets.” He sees the price increase less as overpaying and more as a market correction, reflecting genuine demand for the handful of truly differentiated Chinese programs.
Why China Keeps Winning on Speed
Malin, who has led AstraZeneca’s expanding relationship with Chinese pharma CSPC (now four deals deep since a first licensing agreement in 2024, including a manufacturing joint venture) talked to the competitive gap. “China is clearly so much faster at developing a molecule than us.” She added that speed, efficiency, and low cost mean Chinese companies “don’t need all to succeed”; if they can produce ten or twenty candidates quickly, finding a home for just one or two is enough to win.
Toby cautioned against reading too much into the volume, though: “We shouldn’t assume all coming out of China is innovative; there’s a complete mix.” Daniel Chancellor’s own data backed the scale of what’s happening even as he flagged where the narrative gets oversimplified: the Chinese pipeline sits at six or seven thousand known active programs, and for the first time, more drugs had their first launch in China last year than in the US. But he also noted that pipeline growth is beginning to plateau, and Chinese assets still represent only about 3% of Western companies’ pipelines — meaning there’s room to grow even as the “explosive growth” story matures.
Daniel Chancellor suggested that there are six or seven thousand known active programs running in China right now, and for the first time last year, more drugs had their first launch in China than in the US. He also noted that pipeline growth is beginning to plateau by Norstella’s tracking, and that Chinese assets still represent only about 3% of Western companies’ pipelines, meaning there’s room to grow even as the “explosive growth” story matures.
Deal Structures Are Getting Bigger and More Flexible
Frances described a shift toward broader, option-based collaborations rather than single-asset licenses, pointing to Hengrui’s deals with GSK (up to $12.5 billion for up to twelve programs) and BMS ($15 billion, spanning 13 programs) as examples of what she called “outsourced R&D,” where pharma buys access to a discovery engine rather than one molecule. Malin described a similar evolution in AstraZeneca’s own CSPC relationship, moving from a straight license to a staged structure with option exercises built in as trust develops.
Geopolitics complicates some of this. Frances noted that after the BMS-Hengrui deal, a US congressional representative publicly flagged it as a national security concern. A reminder that even well-structured collaborations aren’t immune to political scrutiny. Daniel Rankin also pointed to the practical effect of most-favored-nation pricing uncertainty in the US: even though MFN hasn’t formally changed anything yet, the threat alone has caused the pipeline of ex-US licensing opportunities to largely dry up, since biotechs don’t want to put their US market value at risk.
Europe’s Innovation Cliff
“We have a market that doesn’t work for pharmaceuticals,” announced Daniel Rankin. He pointed to weak pricing rewards for innovation, harder access to capital than in the US, and now direct competition with a Chinese ecosystem that moves faster and cheaper. “I don’t have a solution for this,” he said, “but I think politicians are understanding there’s a risk here that we won’t have innovative medicines coming here.”
Even so, he was clear-eyed about where Europe still wins: strong universities, deep biomedical research, and, particularly in the Nordics, a tight-knit ecosystem where CROs, physicians, and regulators work well together to get early-stage programs off the ground. Saying that, his advice for founders was still pointed: “If I were a biotech, I’d list in the US” for the capital access alone, even if Europe remains a good place to start.
What Comes Next
Asked whether IP and quality concerns around Chinese partners still hold up, the panel largely agreed those worries have faded. Toby said the conversation “has just moved on” as deal track records accumulated; Daniel Rankin noted that Chinese companies don’t command billion-dollar upfronts without solid IP and GxP compliance. One nuance he shared from a Chinese colleague: “The only moat that exists here is speed”, meaning IP protects less than simply moving faster than the next competitor. That dynamic is already changing behavior in the Nordics, with Frances noting that companies are staying in stealth mode far longer, sometimes twelve months or more, specifically to avoid tipping off faster-moving rivals before they’re ready.
On where to look next, India came up as a name to watch, though panelists were cautious about the comparison to China given different underlying systems and IP maturity. AI drew more mixed reactions — most panelists said it’s proving useful for screening and productivity but hasn’t yet proven itself end-to-end in drug discovery. Simon’s closing advice to Nordic and European biotech was to lean into unique scientific strengths rather than chase the same crowded modalities as everyone else: “Innovation can come from anywhere,” but differentiation, not speed, is where smaller ecosystems can still compete.
