Why China Biotech Is Getting a DeepSeek Moment Too

The country is emerging as an attractive place for Big Pharma to chase billion-dollar licensing deals.

- Shuli Ren

From artificial intelligence to military defense, China has offered a few DeepSeek moments in 2025, showcasing that the country is more than just the world's biggest factory, and that it also can compete with the US on the technology front. Now biotech is having its own.

In late May, Pfizer agreed to pay a record US$1.25 billion (S$1.6 billion) upfront to license an experimental cancer drug from Shenyang-based 3SBio, as well as making a US$100 million equity investment in the Hong Kong-listed biotech company. Two weeks later, Bristol Myers Squibb said it would pay BioNTech US$1.5 billion guaranteed to license a similar cancer asset. It was a win for BioNTech, which bought Biotheus, the Chinese company that developed the drug, late in 2024 for US$800 million.

Increasingly, big pharmaceutical companies are seeing Chinese biotech as the disruptors. These two deals will allow Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb to go after Merck's Keytruda, the world's top-selling medicine. 3SBio's drug works in the same way as a therapy from China's Akeso, which outperformed Keytruda in one trial. US-based Summit Therapeutics licensed Akeso's assets for US$500 million upfront in late 2022.