In 2017, a little-known company called Nanjing Legend Biotech walked into the ASCO annual meeting at the 11th hour, dropped a 100% objective response rate for a cell therapy that would become Carvykti, and single-handedly put Chinese biotech on the global map. Nearly a decade later, taking the center stage at ASCO 2026, Akeso’s ivonescimab made history by offering the first-ever Chinese data set to command a coveted spot on the plenary session.
“We see a lot of sophistication and skill in Chinese companies,” Marjorie Green, M.D., head of oncology global clinical development at Merck Research Laboratories, said in an interview.
The maturity of the Chinese biopharma industry is evidenced by the deals it has signed.
Through a potential $3.3 billion pact in 2024, Merck secured global rights to a PD-1xVEGF competitor to ivonescimab from China’s LaNova Medicines. The following year, LaNova was acquired by Sino Biopharm in the first full acquisition of an innovative Chinese biotech by a domestic large pharma on record, a milestone widely viewed as evidence of an increasingly mature ecosystem.
At ASCO, ivonescimab’s landmark overall survival (OS) win against a PD-1 inhibitor in their respective combinations with chemotherapy in first-line squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) was just one of numerous studies of Chinese assets that reshaped the conference’s narrative.
In what Natalie Vokes, M.D., of the MD Anderson Cancer Center said “could well be a practice-changing study” if validated in a global trial, Kelun-Biotech’s TROP2 antibody-drug conjugate, sac-TMT, paired with Keytruda, slashed the risk of progression or death by 65% versus Keytruda alone in Chinese patients with previously untreated PD-L1-positive NSCLC. That drug, too, also has been swept into the Merck universe.
Even though the study used Keytruda monotherapy as the comparator, Vokes noted on stage that the progression-free survival (PFS) efficacy of the sac-TMT combo compares favorably to historical data for Keytruda plus chemo.
"I go to bed and wake up with in my mind there are two things, China and AI," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said.
Opening that same lung cancer session on May 29, Dizal Pharma showed that its small molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor Zegfrovy improved PFS by 45% compared with chemo among first-line NSCLC patients with EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations, the exact field where Takeda had stumbled with Exkivity.
Compared to Johnson & Johnson’s antibody Rybrevant, used alongside chemo, Zegfrovy offers “the advantage of a single oral agent administration,” John Heymach, M.D., chair of thoracic/head and neck medical oncology at MD Anderson, noted during his presentation.
The third Chinese asset sharing the same stage, a next-generation RET inhibitor called lunbotinib, also hails from Kelun.
“Over the last three years, especially in emerging fields like bispecifics and ADCs, China has become so essential, some are even saying that if a session doesn’t include presentations or data from China, it’s simply not worth attending,” Dajun Yang, M.D., Ph.D., CEO of Ascentage Pharma, said in an interview with Fierce. “In sectors like bispecifics, bispecific ADCs or protein degraders, up to a third of the studies presented are coming out of China.”
The speed engine
New compounds are entering clinical trials in China at an unprecedented speed. In 2015, Ascentage secured five Investigational New Drug (IND) clearances from Chinese regulators across two molecules. At the time, that total IND number ranked third among Chinese biopharmas. Today, China sometimes clears 20 IND approvals in a single week, Yang noted.
The sheer volume has caught attention across the Pacific. During a speech to FDA staffers on April 1, then-FDA head Marty Makary, M.D., flagged that China today has four times more phase 1 initiations than the U.S.
Paradoxically, China’s IND review timeline is not as fast as the U.S. FDA, Yang observed. Instead, the pace of preclinical lab tests helps set China apart in the speed of the entire IND process.
For its BTK degrader candidate APG-3288, Ascentage entered good laboratory practice (GLP) toxicology studies in April 2025 and received FDA IND clearance two days before Christmas—an eight-month process from an IND bid to a regulatory green light.
If the GLP work had been done in the U.S., simply waiting in line to launch primate studies could have taken half a year on its own, Yang noted.
At ASCO, Ascentage shared phase 1b updates of its olverembatinib, a China-approved third-generation BCR-ABL1 inhibitor and potential competitor to Novartis’ blockbuster Scemblix, in patients with lymphoid blast phase chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) or Ph+ B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia, as well as in second-line chronic-phase CML.
The drug is commercially partnered with Innovent Biologics in China, while Takeda holds an option to in-license the TKI through a potential $1.3 billion deal signed in 2024.
Takeda’s ties with China have been deepening. More recently, the Japanese pharma paid none other than Innovent $1.2 billion upfront for rights to two oncology candidates. One of the programs, a potential first-in-class PD-1/IL-2 bispecific fusion protein called IBI363 (TAK-928), showcased phase 1 proof-of-concept lung cancer data at ASCO 2026.
“We actually found that China biotechs currently are just a tremendous source, honestly, of innovation,” Takeda’s oncology R&D head, P.K. Morrow, M.D., told Fierce. “In the past, one might have looked at it as follow-on molecules, and that is completely untrue now.”
‘Their second step’
With Takeda, Innovent will co-develop and co-commercialize IBI363. Until recently, this deal structure was not very common compared with early research collaborations, pure licensing arrangements or asset purchases between Chinese biotechs and large multinational pharmas. Similar collaboration terms can also be found in Bristol Myers Squibb’s $15.2 billion, broad partnership with Hengrui Pharma.
On the eve of ASCO 2026, Innovent stole the limelight with its own massive multi-asset partnership with Pfizer, which also includes co-development and co-commercialization terms around four assets.
“These are clear votes of confidence on the abilities of at least these specific companies—Hengrui and Innovent—to conduct development and generate assets at a similar level to that of their partner multinational pharmas,” Helen Chen, global sector co-head for healthcare and a Greater China managing partner of L.E.K. Consulting, told Fierce.
Pfizer examined Innovent’s drug development track record and their discovery engine and was “very excited in what we saw about the quality,” Johanna Bendell, M.D., Pfizer’s chief development officer of oncology, said in an interview.
Bendell’s boss is perhaps blunter.
“I go to bed and wake up with in my mind there are two things: China and AI,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a podcast aired May 20, before quickly adding, “and politics, unfortunately.”
Despite the vote of confidence, Innovent CEO Michael Yu, Ph.D., acknowledges that Innovent’s internal capabilities are not yet strong enough to support a solo act on the global market.
“That’s why we have to find a company that is willing to take this journey together with us,” Yu told Fierce.
The four assets to be co-developed under the Pfizer pact also drew interest from other companies, enabling Innovent to press for the co-development terms, Yu said. For IBI363, Innovent even left higher bids on the table to choose Takeda because the partner, besides global oncology know-how, is willing to work under a co-development framework, he said.
For his part, Bourla has already sensed that in deal talks with Chinese companies, Western players no longer hold an overwhelmingly dominant position.
“They are focusing on early right now, because they can’t have global clinical development teams yet, and they don’t have commercial development teams yet,” he said during the podcast with Norges Bank Investment Management CEO Nicolai Tangen. “So I’m sure that on the early stage, they would be very quickly better and more productive than us within two years. Then it comes to, they need to transition to being able to take those molecules and bring them to the world alone rather than together with us. And I think that will be their second step.”
A China data question?
BMS had been a believer in Chinese innovation even before teaming up with Hengrui. At ASCO, the New Jersey pharma’s chief medical officer, Cristian Massacesi, M.D., touted the broad potential of a first-in-class EGFRxHER3 bispecific antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), which the pharma giant bought from China’s Sichuan Biokin Pharmaceutical for $800 million upfront. In two phase 3 trials run by Biokin in China, the novel ADC bested chemo on both PFS and OS in patients with previously treated triple-negative breast cancer and esophageal cancer, separately. BMS has now started to conduct registrational studies of the asset globally.
But amid the rounds of applause at ASCO and the stream of multibillion-dollar transactions, doubts and uncertainties linger.
Despite a positive OS readout from Harmoni-6 that exceeded expectations, Akeso’s stock price first shot up, then dropped Monday as its findings’ translatability from China to a global population came into question.
“It’s not necessarily a China question versus a non-China question,” Merck’s Green said. “It has to do with, when you do studies in more homogeneous settings or in smaller groups. There's similar questions to me about, how do things translate when you take it into a broader global study where you’ve got more heterogeneity of care?”
Özlem Türeci, M.D., co-founder and chief medical officer of BioNTech, doesn’t think data reproducibility is a China question, either.
“China's data is as good as data from any region. It’s also being adopted,” she said in an interview with Fierce. “The point is, if you want to have a global development program with global approvals and global launches, you have to conduct global studies. And that’s the reason why at some point regional studies or regional programs have to move into global and have to show that they can be globally confirmed.”
BioNTech has its own rival to ivonescimab, the PD-L1xVEGF bispecific pumitamig, which it initially in-licensed, then fully acquired after buying out China’s Biotheus. BMS quickly signed on to the drug with a co-development and co-commercialization deal. At ASCO, the drug offered the first look at a global data set within the PD-(L)1xVEGF class in first-line NSCLC.
Meanwhile, another Chinese asset could give BioNTech—which quickly ascended to global fame as a COVID vaccine maker—its first commercial oncology product. Licensed from China’s Duality Biologics, the HER2 ADC trastuzumab pamirtecan is moving toward an FDA filing after a positive readout in previously treated endometrial cancer.
BioNTech got trastuzumab pamirtecan and another ADC from Duality for $170 million upfront in 2023, a time when Chinese biotechs were reeling from a pandemic crunch.
Today, as asset quality rises, Chinese drug candidates may be harder to pocket for buyers despite their abundance. In the words of Evaluate analyst Mark Lansdell, China is “not a bargain basement anymore.” While the number of total cross-border licensing deals of Chinese biotech products increased by 120% from 2022 to 2025, the total upfront value jumped about 400%, from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $5.6 billion last year, according to Evaluate.
The geopolitical shadow
Above the scientific discussions and deal talks, the dark cloud of geopolitics hovered over the Chicago convention center.
Going forward, accessing China's biotech assets could become more difficult for U.S. companies as calls for restricting cross-border deals through the COINS Act grow louder. To some, the solution to maintaining the U.S.’ leadership in biotech is blocking China, along with any collaborations with the country. But others, like Pfizer’s Bourla, have pushed back on this mentality.
“[The U.S.] should stop trying with all the heart and brains that they have to put 80% of their effort [on] how to slow down China,” Bourla said during the podcast. “Very big mistake. Because it’s a waste of resources and brain power because you will never slow them down. The genie is out of the bottle. We should put 80% of our focus and effort [on] how to become better than China.”
From the U.S. biotech industry’s side, Bruce Booth, partner at Atlas Venture, echoed the sentiment in a June 2 blog post, framing China’s rise as “more opportunity than threat” and “a healthy forcing function to raise the game for everyone.”
Still, beneath the big headlines, the friction was felt on the ground at ASCO.
“China biotech presence in ASCO [this year] is not as many as the peak years in my memory,” observed Leon Tang, Ph.D., founder of the business development consultancy InScienceWeTrust BioAdvisory, pointing to rising travel costs and visa uncertainty as common concerns.
Yet, the pioneers of the space remain undeterred. As more Chinese drugs vie to stage their own Carvykti moment, Frank Fan, M.D., Ph.D., the scientific mind behind the cell therapy’s breakthrough, returned to ASCO this year with a new proposal: an off-the-shelf CAR-T platform with potential for unprecedented production scalability without the need for gene editing.
His new company, Wondercel Therapeutics, debuted early data from four patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, showing early signs that its candidate can avoid premature clearance by the host immune system while achieving CAR-T expansion at levels similar to that of autologous CAR-T inside a patient’s body.
For his new platform, Fan again hopes to deploy the same partnership model that built Legend—even if a COINS Act expansion would mean a deal with a U.S. company like Carvykti’s partner J&J would not be possible.
“Even if obstacles do arise in the future, we still have Europe, Japan and other regions to partner with,” Fan said. “As long as we maintain innovation, and as long as international intellectual property laws remain intact, we remain confident.”
Editor's note: Zoey Becker and Darren Incorvaia contributed reporting.