Vera Zheng is Head of Greater China and Head of Asia Pacific Strategy at Parexel, one of the world's leading clinical research organisations. With a career spanning medical marketing, brand strategy, product management and clinical research across multinational and CRO environments, Zheng has built one of the most distinctive leadership profiles in the Asia Pacific life sciences sector. In this interview, she reflects on China's extraordinary clinical trial transformation, the evolving ambitions of Chinese biotech, and what it takes to shape – rather than simply serve – a rapidly maturing regional ecosystem.
Can you outline your career path and how you came to lead Parexel’s Greater China and Asia Pacific strategy?
My path has been rather unconventional by industry standards. I graduated from medical school in Shanghai – one of China’s leading institutions, affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University – but rather than pursuing clinical practice, I was drawn towards the commercial side of healthcare from the outset. I began my career as a medical marketing specialist at a Danish pharmaceutical company, then moved into brand and product management at Kodak. That period was formative. It gave me a rigorous grounding in market sizing, demand forecasting, portfolio management, and profit-and-loss accountability – disciplines that proved far more transferable than I perhaps appreciated at the time.
From there, I spent a period at Allianz as Head of Brand Marketing before making the transition into the CRO industry. I joined what was then Quintiles – now IQVIA – initially as Head of Marketing for Greater China, before expanding my remit to cover Asia Pacific marketing. I joined Parexel a decade ago, initially heading marketing for the region, then progressively taking on strategy responsibilities, and ultimately assuming leadership of Greater China. That is the arc of the journey.
How did your background in marketing prepare you for a senior leadership role in strategy and general management?
I have always been drawn to new territories – intellectually and professionally. But I think the transition was more logical than it might appear from the outside. In the consumer goods industry, product marketing is genuinely the core of the business. It encompasses strategic planning, market analysis, forecasting, product portfolio management and end-to-end commercial management – including supply chain considerations. That breadth of exposure meant that when I stepped into a formal strategy role at Parexel, many of the underlying analytical muscles were already well developed.
The key competencies – reading market dynamics accurately, making informed investment decisions, designing service portfolios for specific client segments – transferred directly. The context was different, the industry was different, but the strategic logic was remarkably consistent.
How has Parexel’s business in China evolved, and which client segments are you serving today?
Parexel has approximately 22000 + people globally, of whom nearly 9,000 are based across Asia Pacific, with more than 2,000 in Greater China alone. We are one of the very few global CROs with both deep historical roots and a fully functional, end-to-end operational presence in this region – covering all the core functions you would expect of a leading CRO.
We established our China operations more than 25 years ago, initially to support large multinational pharmaceutical companies seeking to include China in their global Phase III programmes or to conduct local registration studies. That remained the primary model for many years. What has changed significantly is the emergence of a second and equally important client base: Chinese biotech companies with genuine global ambitions. These organisations are not only developing drugs for the domestic market – they are building assets intended for submission to the FDA and EMA, and they need a partner who understands both regulatory environments with equal fluency.
More recently, we have also seen a third trend: both multinational and foreign biotech companies looking to leverage China’s drug discovery and early-phase clinical capabilities for faster proof-of-concept work and de-risking. So the flow runs in both directions – China to global, and global to China – and our business reflects that duality quite evenly, with roughly a 50-50 revenue split between those two client streams.
How has China’s drug development landscape changed during your time atParexel, and what has driven this transformation?
The pace of evolution here is genuinely unlike anything I have observed elsewhere. In my 15 years in the CRO industry, China has built its entire clinical research ecosystem – the regulatory architecture, the investigator network, the financing infrastructure – probably three times faster than comparable developments in other parts of the world.
If you compare 2015 with today, the shifts are structural and profound. On the regulatory side, China has implemented sweeping reforms that have fundamentally accelerated the pace of innovation. The full implementation of ICH GCP standards are to be commenced, and last year the regulator introduced a 30-day passive approval process for IND submissions – a timeline now broadly comparable to that of the FDA. These are not incremental adjustments; they represent a wholesale reorientation of the regulatory environment towards global standards.
The capital markets story is equally compelling. In the early 2010s, venture capital investment in Chinese pharmaceutical innovation was negligible, and there was no viable IPO pathway for pre-revenue biotech companies. Today, through private market, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the STAR Market, and NASDAQ listings, that sector represents a combined market capitalisation exceeding USD 200 billion. The funding infrastructure has matured at an extraordinary rate.
The pipeline data tells the same story. In 2015, China accounted for approximately four percent of the global innovation pipeline and a similarly modest share of global licensing deals. By last year, those figures had risen to 30 percent of the global innovation pipeline and 20 percent of global licensing transactions. And in terms of domestic revenue from innovative drugs, the top five Chinese pharmaceutical companies generated around 0.1 billion USD in 2015. Last year, that figure reached 10 billion USD – a hundredfold increase in a decade. McKinsey projects the innovative drug market in China will reach USD 50 billion by 2028. The trajectory is exceptional.
How have CROs adapted to this rapid growth, and what will define the next phase of evolution?
It is important to frame this correctly, because 2026 marks the opening year of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan, and original innovation has been explicitly designated as a national priority within that plan – with innovative drug development and artificial intelligence both identified as key pillars. If you combine a strong policy tailwind with AI-enabled acceleration across discovery and clinical development, I believe China will not merely sustain its current momentum but emerge as an even more powerful global force in pharmaceutical innovation.
Against that backdrop, it is worth being precise about where the CRO opportunity currently stands. 2025 was an extraordinary year for Chinese biotech, but not necessarily for CROs in the way one might expect. The majority of assets out-licensed last year were still at discovery or very early-stage development – meaning the clinical work had been conducted exclusively within China before the asset was transferred to a foreign partner. We did not see a corresponding spike in global clinical studies being outsourced to CROs. The two phenomena have not yet fully converged.
However, I believe that is beginning to change, and the direction of travel over the next three to five years is clear. There are two forces at work. First, regulatory expectations – particularly from the FDA – are evolving towards a preference for clinical data generated by international investigator populations, not exclusively Chinese cohorts. Second, as Chinese biotech companies secure stronger funding positions, the commercial logic of maximising asset value through global development becomes increasingly compelling. Why out-license early when you can develop further, demonstrate broader clinical validity, and negotiate from a position of significantly greater strength?
The result, I expect, will be a gradual but meaningful shift – from early-stage out-licensing towards co-development arrangements and fully outsourced global Phase One, Phase Two, and eventually Phase Three programmes. This will not happen overnight; it requires these companies to develop new operational capabilities. But for a global CRO like Parexel, that transition represents a substantial opportunity, precisely because we understand the regulatory expectations of both the FDA and EMA, and we can help Chinese sponsors plan their global development strategies from the very outset.
How internationally oriented are today’s Chinese biotech founders, and how has the talent profile evolved?
You have identified something important. The talent composition has genuinely shifted. Many founders today have built their careers primarily within China, much as I did. However, I would be cautious about overstating the implications of that. The multinational pharmaceutical companies that have operated in China for 15 to 20 years have cultivated an enormous and sophisticated talent pool here. A substantial proportion of today’s biotech leaders gained their formative experience within those organisations – developing an understanding of global quality standards, international regulatory expectations, and the operational realities of multi-regional clinical trials.
So while the training geography may have shifted, the global fluency that multinational experience provides has been effectively domesticated. These founders are not starting from scratch when it comes to understanding international development frameworks. They are already, in many respects, embedded in the global innovation ecosystem.
How does your Asia Pacific remit operate in practice, and which markets are priorities?
The regional perspective is a natural extension of the China conversation. For multinational pharmaceutical companies and foreign biotechs, China’s role has evolved from being purely a commercial access market – where you ran studies primarily to support domestic registration – to becoming a genuine co-creation partner. I describe this shift as moving from selling in China to creating with China. That distinction matters enormously in terms of how these companies are structuring their development strategies.
The most notable recent trend has been the emergence of China as a destination for drug discovery and early-phase clinical work by foreign sponsors. US-based biotech, venture capital firms, in particular, have begun engaging China for early-phase development of US-originated assets – seeking to leverage the speed, infrastructure, and cost efficiency of the Chinese clinical environment. And increasingly, we are seeing a China-plus-Australia model for early-phase programmes: China for the initial work, followed by Australia for Phase I studies in Caucasian populations. Australia offers a highly favourable regulatory environment – including a well-established tax rebate scheme for innovative drug development – a mature Phase I infrastructure, and access to a Caucasian patient population that is often required for global regulatory submissions.
Japan remains a significant and steadily growing market for clinical research, both in terms of standalone studies and inclusion rates in multi-regional clinical trials. Looking further ahead, I see Southeast Asia and India as the next major wave of growth for clinical development in this region – though on a ten-year horizon rather than five. The economic growth potential across those markets is substantial, and as drug affordability improves, both the commercial and scientific rationale for regional inclusion in global trials will strengthen considerably. Realising that potential, however, will require progress on multiple fronts simultaneously – regulatory harmonisation, clinical site infrastructure, and investigator training and experience. There is no single bottleneck; the ecosystem needs to advance on all dimensions in parallel, which is precisely why the timeline is a decade rather than five years.
To what extent do you see Parexel as shaping the regional ecosystem, rather than simply serving it?
We are very actively engaged in shaping it, and I think that responsibility comes with the scale and history of our presence here. One concrete example is Parexel Academy – a dedicated institutional programme through which we have trained investigators in China in ICH GCP standards and clinical development best practices over the past decade or more. That work has contributed meaningfully to the quality and depth of the investigator network here.
We have replicated that model in India, where we have established a Parexel Academy programme and built a Global Capability Centre of more than 5,000 people. Critically, our ambition for that centre is not simply to maintain an operational resource – it is to transform it into a genuinely innovative hub, integrating advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities into the work conducted there. We also have Site Alliance Network in Southeast Asia India designed to support global studies across the region. Ecosystem development, for us, is not a peripheral activity – it is central to our long-term positioning.
What are the most significant challenges you face today?
The very dynamism that makes this market so compelling is also its primary challenge. When a market is evolving at this pace, the risk of misreading customer needs – or of being even slightly behind the curve in terms of service design – is significant. Client requirements are shifting year on year, sometimes faster than that. The second major challenge is talent. A decade ago, there were perhaps five global capability centres operating in the life sciences sector in this region. Today there are significantly more, and they are all competing for the same pool of skilled professionals. Attracting the right people is only half the equation; retaining them and providing genuine development pathways – particularly as we seek to elevate their skills. Getting the talent strategy right is, in many respects, the foundation on which everything else rests.
As a final word, what would you say to potential clients or sponsors considering Parexel as their partner for Asia Pacific development?
Asia Pacific has become one of Parexel’s most significant growth drivers globally, and that is a direct reflection of the clinical trial growth rates we are seeing here, which consistently outpace the global average. Our commitment to this region is long-standing, deep, and continuing to expand.
What distinguishes us, I believe, is the combination of our regulatory expertise, operational experience across regions and our partnership -including site network. We have a globally integrated regulatory consulting capability – including former FDA, EMA, CDE and PMDA reviewers – that allows us to help clients develop regulatory strategies that work not just for a single market, but across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. That matters enormously for the Chinese biotech companies seeking to navigate the FDA, EMA and PMDA, and equally for multinational sponsors seeking to integrate Asia Pacific sites into their global programmes effectively.
Our site and & Patient Advocacy Group (PAG) relationships across the region also give us a genuine operational advantage in patient recruitment and retention – both of which we consistently deliver above the industry norm. That combination of strategic regulatory expertise and strong execution is what we offer, and it is what we will continue to build on.
