SUZHOU, China – Global intellectual property lawyers and consultants are quick to advise U.S. and European biotechs that they need a “China strategy” – guidance that usually generates a response akin to Scarlett O’Hara’s famous “I’ll think about it tomorrow” speech. And who can blame biotechs for procrastinating? They’re beset with the here and now: raising money, managing contract research and manufacturing organizations, submitting grant applications, designing studies, filing patents, meeting with potential partners and seeking consensus with regulators. I had the same skepticism about a hurry-up approach to China. But after networking among some of the 800-plus attendees at...

"If you plan to be around five or 10 years from now, you have to have a Chinese strategy." That poignant comment in a BioWorld Today article came from Joshua Boger in 2011. The founder and former CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., and now executive chairman of Alkeus Pharmaceuticals Inc., had just returned from China where Shanghai Syntheall Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd., a manufacturing subsidiary of Wuxi Apptec Co. Ltd., is the manufacturing site for starting materials for Vertex's hepatitis C drug Incivek (telaprevir). A combined massive government investment, a growing appetite for capitalism, and a shift from pharmaceutical industry service...

“Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” That was a famous line from the 1937 Broadway musical, Babes in Arms, shouted to exhort the old gang to take action to save the orphanage. As the theater market just put on its Tony Awards to assess the state of its industry, June is also the most active event season for biopharma, as the industry puts on its own long-running show, with the ASCO and BIO events taking center stage this month. Only this time, it’s not the orphanage that’s in need, but the orphan drugs – as well as the biosimilars,...

I’m an American baby boomer. For me – and I suspect many others of my generation – China’s image has not been the best. In my mental collage, fascination with Chinese culture and invention is offset by wariness of China’s political system and potential power. Some parts of the collage: as a boy, listening to stories told by a Korean War vet uncle and neighbors about hand-to-hand fighting with young Chinese soldiers wearing tennis shoes on their frozen feet at Chosin Reservoir; as a teen, accounts of Mao Zedong’s chaotic Cultural Revolution, its purges and Red Guards; in middle age,...