Biopharma is increasingly going global, and its top destination is China—at least currently.
Just in the first six months of the year, licensing deals with Chinese drugmakers have blown past $100 billion in total value, according to the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, as reported by state media Xinhua in July. This eastward trend includes some of the industry’s biggest pharma players, such as Novartis, AstraZeneca and even trillion-dollar-club member Eli Lilly.
But the specter of geopolitics looms over China. In December 2025, President Donald Trump signed the BIOSECURE Act into law, restricting partnerships with certain Chinese “companies of concern,” flagged by the U.S. government as national security threats. While a watered-down version of the original bill was passed, many still expect the law to have far-reaching implications on the industry.
To minimize risk, many drugmakers are starting to look beyond China.
“Biopharma companies are looking harder at established alternatives as China becomes more competitive and geopolitically complicated,” Cody Powers, principal at the consulting firm ZS, told BioSpace in an email.
Congressional letters sent to the CEOs of Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Merck, BMS and AbbVie this week voicing concerns about the pharmas’ clinical trials in China highlight an ongoing discrepancy in how government and industry think about the rise of the Asian country’s biotech industry.
The economics of picking these alternatives is “straightforward,” Powers continued—drug development is simply cheaper overseas. The U.S. remains the most important end market for most biopharma companies, but the upstream question is simply: “What is the fastest, most efficient and most cost-effective way to get an asset from idea to market?”
Nandita Shangari, managing director of venture at RA Capital, puts it more bluntly: “Drug development has ‘gone global’ as it has become too expensive to keep testing novel, unproven biology in the U.S. alone, where costs are higher than anywhere else,” she told BioSpace in an email interview. Drug development is a notoriously expensive and risky enterprise, Shangari explained, with costs routinely reaching into the billions and where failure is commonplace.
“When failure is that expensive, sponsors have to change where they take their earliest, riskiest bets,” she added.
With China growing increasingly geopolitically fraught, the risk calculus for moving early development there may no longer make sense to some drugmakers.
Here, BioSpace looks at five other potentially less risky destinations for biopharma investment.
For companies that are looking to expand or maintain their Asia presence but want to steer clear of China, South Korea is “a logical next destination,” Powers said.
While South Korea doesn’t have the massive scale that China can offer, the country nevertheless “has a mature biotech ecosystem, strong scientific capabilities and an established clinical trial infrastructure that can support efficient recruitment,” he added. South Korea also has a good track record of producing innovative therapies and platforms.
Ram Selvaraju, managing director and senior healthcare equity research analyst at H.C. Wainwright, called South Korea a “giant in the field of biotech manufacturing,” in an email interview with BioSpace. He pointed specifically to the Songdo Bio cluster in Incheon, a hub known for its ability to produce complex macromolecule products at scale.
Some of South Korea’s most well-established players—including Celltrion and Samsung Biologics—are mainstays in the biosimilar arena, though the country has also produced several innovators of late.
These include ABL Bio, which last year attracted hefty investments from GSK and Eli Lilly, and Hanmi Pharma, which just last month partnered with Roche for up to $2.3 billion and also struck a deal worth up to $1.2 billion with Lilly earlier in the summer.
“South Korea has the critical mass and scale,” Selvaraju said, “to conduct meaningful innovation in the domain of drug discovery.”
Australia represents an established—and therefore relatively safe—offshore destination for biopharma, Powers told BioSpace, though the country’s appeal is somewhat different from the emerging powerhouse innovative engines that Asian territories offer.
“U.S. and European companies have been running trials [in Australia] for decades because of favorable economics, regulatory clarity, quality of clinical infrastructure, availability of patients and comparability of standard of care,” he explained. Indeed, Australia has been so embedded in the Western clinical trial ecosystem that data generated in the country are accepted by the FDA and European regulators.
There are many standout companies from Australia, including CSL, which has a wide-array of commercial products, and Telix Pharmaceuticals, which in April commanded a potential $4.3 billion radiopharma promise from Regeneron.
Still, Selvaraju isn’t completely convinced. Success stories from Australia, he told BioSpace, “have been few and far between.”
“The Australian stock market is rife with speculators,” he added, resulting in several local biotechs bringing in money “without having high-quality science or solid clinical execution.” And while Selvaraju concedes that speculators are a problem everywhere, and that the Australian scene could change in the coming years, the problems “appear to be at least somewhat structural in nature.”
But Powers suspects that despite such issues, Australia will remain attractive overseas destination for biopharma companies because, like South Korea, it offers one key advantage: “Their strategic interests are broadly aligned with the U.S. and other Western markets.”
Unlike other territories on this list, Hong Kong doesn’t bill itself as a way for biopharma to completely break free from China. Instead, the territory serves as a “gateway to mainland China,” Paloma Wang, partner at Skadden and co-head of the law firm’s China practice, told BioSpace—one that “offers easy access to the deep talent pool, true innovation, rapid scientific breakthroughs and technology escalation” taking place in the Asian giant.
Aside from its proximity to the mainland, Hong Kong is also well-established as an “international financial center,” according to Wang, which makes it easy for the special administrative region to attract investors worldwide. Hong Kong’s local drug development scene has also matured, she added.
Another big allure for biopharma is Hong Kong’s bustling initial public offering market. The territory’s stock exchange is the second largest biotech funding platform worldwide, just behind Nasdaq in the U.S., according to the HKEX, which noted that Hong Kong IPOs have hit more than $17.5 billion since certain listing reforms enacted in 2018.
Massachusetts-based biotech accelerator LabCentral signed an agreement with Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation in June to connect founders with the U.S. ecosystem—and fuel more innovation.
One U.S. biotech is looking to further grow this total. Axiom Biosciences, based in San Diego, is opting to forego a Nasdaq debut in favor of a Hong Kong IPO, looking to raise anywhere from $150 million to $200 million. CEO Remo Moomiaie-Qajar believes that Hong Kong’s financial environment would be better for the biotech than the current U.S. markets, he told BioSpace in July. Adding to his Hong Kong conviction is Axiom’s existing relationship with several other Asian companies.
All of these—a growing domestic innovative ecosystem, the rise of Asian players in biotech, the vibrant IPO market—feed into Hong Kong’s appeal as a prime biotech destination, Skadden’s Wang told BioSpace. “It is an exciting time in Hong Kong,” she said.
Another attractive alternative to China is India, the only country on this list—or on the planet, for that matter—that can compete in terms of scale. India’s population has blown past 1.47 billion people this year, exceeding China’s 1.41 billion, and the South Asian giant only continues to grow.
But India isn’t merely an emerging life sciences player. The country has long been known as a pharma powerhouse, though like South Korea, much of its homegrown industry is focused on generics and biosimilars. According to the India Brand Equity Foundation, India is the biggest generics provider worldwide, and the country’s pharma sector is third in the world in terms of production volume.
India is also making big business development waves. Earlier this year, Mumbai-based Sun Pharma swallowed New Jersey’s Organon in an $11.75 billion deal, bagging over 70 products and more than six manufacturing sites worldwide. The acquisition remains one of the largest biopharma takeovers of 2026 so far.
There are signs that India is growing beyond its generics phase and emerging as a key innovative hub for biopharma. In a July report, Boston Consulting Group and HealthKois noted that patent filings in India have surged more than four times since 2016, accompanied by the expansion of the country’s innovative drugs pipeline. There has also been an increase in biotech startups and private capital.
Structural gaps in areas including clinical execution and funding limit India’s ability to scale up innovation, according to a report from Boston Consulting Group and HealthKois.
RA Capital’s Shangari is bullish about India’s standing as a global R&D powerhouse in the coming years, noting “significant government initiatives” that could help the country’s growth. These include the BioE3 policy, which she said is “India’s first dedicated national biotech policy,” as well as certain regulatory reforms that, like the changes in China, seek to shorten approval timelines for drugs.
Still, these initiatives will need time to fully bear fruit, Shangari said, with effects building up over a 10- to 15-year period. India, she said, is more of a long game, “not a near-term substitute for China.”
To close out this list, Shangari brings biopharma bucks back west and named Canada as a top substitute to China for R&D investments.
“Canada shows up as the default alternative for Phase 2 work outside China,” she told BioSpace, particularly for gene therapies and similar modalities. For these newer modalities, “sponsors need more supportive regulatory engagement than the U.S. sometimes offers,” Shangari noted.
“This is a regulatory-relationship advantage,” Shangari said, “not just a cost one.”
In terms of innovation, Canada has a roster of homegrown companies that have emerged as serious players in the global biotech industry. Among these is AbCellera Biologics, a Vancouver-based company that just last month touted potentially best-in-class Phase 1/2 data for an investigational antibody for hot flashes in menopausal women. In June, the Vancouver-based company attracted up to $2.46 billion in a cancer partnership with Jazz Pharmaceuticals.
Then there is fellow Vancouverite Zymeworks, which developed the bispecific antibody Ziihera, an anti-HER2 therapy that in October 2022 commanded a $50 million upfront payment as well as nearly $1.4 billion in potential milestones in a licensing deal with Jazz. The drug first won the FDA’s approval in November 2024 for biliary tract cancer and snagged a label expansion late last month for gastric cancer.
