Biotech Week Boston 2026: Takeaways from “Shaping the Future of Biopharma: Global Investment and Innovation in Established & Emerging Markets” Panel

At the LSX Congress USA during Biotech Week Boston in late September, Freshfields partner Andrea Devoe joined a panel on global biopharma investment and innovation, alongside Mark Springel (Vida Ventures) and Debra Yu (Panacea Capital), moderated by Craig Kenesky (Brown Rudnick). China's biotech ecosystem featured heavily in the discussion. Key themes:

Evolving geography of innovation. Debra Yu highlighted the pace of China's biotech capital markets activity, citing roughly two dozen Chinese biotech IPOs this year to date raising more than $7 billion combined, with Nasdaq accounting for roughly two-thirds of that activity as the preferred listing venue. She separately noted that the Hong Kong Exchange remains relatively illiquid. 

On other deal activity, Debra cited an estimate that between a third and roughly half of large pharma's in-licensing today is sourced from China. Where a company incorporates, lists, and raises capital increasingly shapes deal terms long before a deal negotiation ever starts. Mark Springel touched on Australia's R&D tax credit regime as a draw for early clinical work, noting it as a go-to jurisdiction for first-in-human studies alongside China.

Best-in-class vs. first-in-class economy. The panel discussed the dichotomy between best-in-class and first-in-class assets coming out of Asia, and the related issue of venture investors' willingness to bear the risk of bridging China-generated clinical data to U.S. regulatory standards to position a company for an eventual IPO or big pharma M&A exit. 

This distinction shapes both scientific and deal risk: a first-in-class asset is pursuing a novel mechanism with no clinical precedent, carrying higher biological and regulatory uncertainty but the prospect of category-defining exclusivity if it succeeds. A best-in-class asset instead targets an already-validated mechanism, reducing that scientific risk but requiring real differentiation — on efficacy, safety, or dosing — to avoid being commoditized against approved competitors in the same class. That difference in risk profile is precisely what shows up in how these assets get valued and structured, with more speculative, first-in-class programs often carrying greater milestone weighting relative to upfront payment.

Deal structures are diversifying to match the risk. Andrea Devoe framed the choice among whole-company acquisition, program-specific M&A, joint venture, and licensing and collaboration as a spectrum of control, risk, and speed — with program-specific M&A seeing significant current activity, since they let a buyer take on a single program's risk and real IP ownership without absorbing a full company. 

This connected to a broader discussion of emerging "NewCo" structures spinning China-originated assets into freshly capitalized vehicles and investors' active (rather than historically passive) roles. The practical significance is that dealmakers no longer default to a single playbook: choosing where to sit on the deal spectrum is now a first-order strategic decision made in close consultation with legal counsel.

What has to be true before capital commits. On what actually needs to hold up before capital moves into an emerging market, Andrea Devoe pointed to four legal and diligence preconditions: 

• a clean IP estate;
• data that is legally usable and transferable;
• a workable ownership/investment structure from a legal and regulatory perspective; and
• enforceability of agreements. 

The broader panel sentiment was one of engaging with the specific issues in China-originated data and assets rather than avoiding them outright. Each of these preconditions addresses a different point of failure that can unwind a deal after signing — unclear title can strip a buyer of the very asset it thought it acquired, data that cannot legally move can stall clinical development entirely, and the absence of a reliable enforcement mechanism can leave a wronged party with a judgment it cannot collect on. Treating these as diligence and negotiation items to be worked through, rather than reasons to avoid the market altogether, is what is allowing deal volume to keep growing even as the legal landscape gets more complex.

A related theme worth watching: how U.S. drug-pricing policy, including most-favored-nation pricing, is reshaping the economics and diligence (“CRE”) terms built into cross-border licensing deals — a shift that is prompting parties to revisit pricing, diligence, and royalty provisions in agreements signed well before these policies existed, with a careful eye on antitrust considerations.

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