Focusing on Asset Acquisition Over Building a Single Platform Technology

Earlier this year, Pharmaceutical Executive reported on China’s growing prominence in the pharma and biotech spaces. During this year, billions of dollars have been committed to licensing commitments with Chinese companies, with many US-based companies making up a significant percentage of those deals.

According to the report, these deals hit a record high in 2024 at about $51.9 billion, which was a 90% jump from 2023’s numbers. This number then increased again in 2025 and is expected to increase again by the end of 2026.

Pharmaceutical Executive spoke with K2 Therapeutics’ CEO Dr. Ying Huang about the growing shift towards globally sourced innovation and the increased focus on foreign partnerships. The push has become so strong that it’s even impacted how investors analyze pharma and biotech companies.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What have you learned focusing on asset acquisition over building a single platform technology?
Dr. Ying Huang: Drug discovery is a lengthy and capital-intensive process. On average, it takes eight to ten years and between one and two billion dollars in total investment to bring a drug from discovery in the lab to FDA approval. To accelerate that timeline and reduce those costs, one approach is to in-license clinical or preclinical stage assets from other countries — assets that already have preliminary data from human patients — and then advance them further in the United States. That strategy can meaningfully compress both the cost and the timeline of drug development by building on work that has already been done rather than starting from scratch.