China This week’s China healthcare highlights from PharmaBoardroom content partner Selesta include Merck’s $2.13B deal with SciBrunch for KRAS G12D inhibitor SPR2015, Abogen’s $7.78B partnership with Novartis for an mRNA T-cell engager, and 3SBio’s ¥1.75B GLP-1 deal with MindRank. Other updates feature AstraZeneca’s $2B investment in Summit, Hengrui’s $2.6B GLP-1/GIP deal…

USA Falling prices are squeezing US generic and biosimilar manufacturers too hard, argues John Murphy III, President and CEO of the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM). Generic prices have dropped an average of 7.7 percent a year over the past five years while medical inflation ran at 6.2 percent, and Murphy…

India Ajay Mahipal of India-focused healthcare impact and venture capital investment platform HealthKois argues that India’s life-sciences ecosystem is approaching an inflection point. Having built its reputation on manufacturing scale, the country now has a narrow window to build the clinical-development capabilities needed to originate and test novel therapies itself. India…

Japan Japan is resetting itself as a clinical trial destination. Costs have halved, local data requirements are being relaxed, and the country is actively courting the global biotechs that have long overlooked it for trials. The opportunity is real; but so is the ground Japan still must make up.   Japan’s…

Korea Korea’s position as a clinical trials hub did not happen overnight. The country has treated clinical development as a matter of deliberate government policy for the better part of two decades, with Korea ranking among the world’s leading trial destinations as far back as 2018; years before China’s biotech ambitions…

APAC The global AI-in-clinical-trials market is forecast to grow at a 22.6 percent CAGR through 2030, reaching roughly USD 6.5 billion, as sponsors push CROs to demonstrate concrete efficiency gains rather than incremental process tweaks. That growth is already visible on the ground in APAC: AI has moved well beyond the…

Taiwan Taiwan’s population of just 23 million people and contested political status should, in theory, harm its chances of becoming a globally relevant clinical trials hub. In fact, these two factors – which have forced the island to adopt the most rigorous international standards and build a dense web of global…

China China has rapidly become the world’s leading country for clinical trial volume, alongside the stratospheric growth of its local biotech industry, which now accounts for almost a third of the global drug development pipeline. The high speed and low cost of Chinese trials are unmatched globally. However, in a volatile…

Denmark Novo Nordisk has rebranded as ‘Novo’ and plans to enter new therapeutic areas as part of CEO Maziar Mike Doustdar’s push to reinvigorate growth. The company has already reinvented itself once in recent memory. Faced with flatlining sales in the late 2010s, Novo transformed from a narrow diabetes specialist into…

Africa Diabetes is surging in Africa. But, in a continent where healthcare systems are set up to support treatments for infectious – not non-communicable – diseases, can pharma companies step up to meet demand? A new report from the Access to Medicine Foundation suggests that they can, but that new market…

Germany Germany is the default first-choice European market for launching new, innovative medicines. But with the country’s pricing system under growing strain from both national and international pressures, some in the industry are asking how long that status can hold.   Germany is, by far, Europe’s leading country for fast and…

Global The global contract manufacturing market is booming, but fragmented. The well-established names of the CDMO space – Lonza, Thermo Fisher, WuXi AppTec, WuXi Biologics, and Samsung Biologics – account for just 15 percent of total revenues.   Beyond these giants, a huge network of smaller, more specialised CDMOs are, in…