Bristol Myers Squibb Partners With China's Hengrui Pharma on Early-Stage Drug Development and Discovery

Bristol Myers Squibb announced a partnership with Hengrui Pharma on Tuesday to develop about a dozen drugs together. Four of the drugs were discovered by Bristol Myers Squibb and will be sent to China for Hengrui to run early-stage clinical trials. The companies will also collaborate to discover new drugs, with each contributing assets to the potentially multi-billion dollar partnership.

The deal marks a shift from the typical pattern in which large drugmakers license experimental medicines that have already undergone early testing in China. Bristol Myers Squibb will instead carry out early drug development there, aiming to bring treatments to market more quickly.

U.S. Company on both existing compounds and new discoveries. A little more than half of large pharmaceutical companies' licensing deals have come from China so far this year, according to data from DealForma. That compares with 39% of such deals in 2025 and 5% in 2022.

American and European biopharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, Merck and AstraZeneca have increasingly turned to China in search of potential blockbusters. "It's a huge signal," said Michael Baran, head of private investments at Affinity Asset Advisors and a former partner at Pfizer Ventures.

Bristol and Hengrui will each contribute assets and will work together on developing new drugs, making China look less like a source of one-off molecules and more like a part of pharma's global research and development operating system, Baran said.