Spain With a huge investment from AstraZeneca at its core, can the Spanish city of Barcelona really now rival more established European life sciences ecosystems?   Back in 2023, Barcelona was a somewhat surprising choice for AstraZeneca’s new global R&D hub. The Catalan capital, Spain’s second largest city, lacks both the…

LatAm Real-world evidence (RWE) is now a regular part of health technology assessment in Europe and North America. In this article, first published in ISPOR’s Value & Outcomes Spotlight (July/August 2026), authors from six of ISPOR’s Latin American chapters argue that the region has plenty of health data. What it lacks…

China This week’s China healthcare highlights from PharmaBoardroom content partner Selesta include Asieris’ $250M deal with Theramex for APL-1702 (CEVIRA®), MicuRx’s $974M collaboration with ClearideBio for MRX-23 and ADC programs, and Defand’s partnership with Roche on molecular glue degraders. Other updates feature DualityBio’s IPO progress, Akeso’s Phase III NSCLC trial, and…

Korea Korea, the world’s 13th-largest pharma market, is rolling out its biggest reform to pharma pricing in a generation, slashing what it pays for generics and using the savings to get innovative medicines to patients faster and at better prices. The same squeeze on generic margins, combined with new rewards for…

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…