Amid the Chinese biopharma licensing boom, Hengrui Pharmaceuticals stands out from the crowd.
The Jiangsu-based company landed one of the largest licensing deals ever by a Chinese company courtesy of a head-turning $15.2 billion biobucks pact with Bristol Myers Squibb in May. At the same time, Hengrui has been quietly pioneering the transition from a straight-up licensor of innovative drugs to a co-developer that’s establishing New-Co entities with its Western partners.
While Hengrui may have only recently been attracting international attention, the company is far from a fresh-faced startup. Instead, Hengrui is considered a China-wide “Big Pharma” on its home turf and stays on top of almost every metric—from market value and R&D pipeline to prescription sales—in the country.
Hengrui’s story dates back to 1970, when it was founded in Lianyungang, a coastal city in Jiangsu province. It launched its first IPO in mainland China in 2000 and a second IPO in Hong Kong in 2025. Now, the company oversees 15 R&D centers across the globe and employs around 20,000 people.
This more than half a century of institutional knowledge helps explain Hengrui’s transformation into an innovation powerhouse and its ambitions to enter the global market.
According to the company’s 2025 annual results presentation, Hengrui has over 400 clinical trials in the works testing more than 100 new molecule entities across its four main therapeutic areas: oncology; metabolic and cardiovascular diseases; immunological and respiratory diseases; and neuroscience.
The biopharma’s multiple specialized R&D platforms, including one powered by AI, have maintained a high output of about 20 new molecule entities per year. This has helped Hengrui reach the position where it is now ranked by Citeline as the second-largest self-originated pharma pipeline in the world.
In an interview with Fierce, Lianshan Zhang, Ph.D., executive vice president responsible for Hengrui's innovation ecosystem, explained that 2027 will be a “harvest season” for the company’s enormous pipeline.
“From the point of clinical development, it absolutely will be,” said Zhang, who added that the biopharma is still “seeking quality instead of just quantity.”
This has been the driving strategy for Hengrui over the past five years—to develop differentiated candidates that have best-in-class potential, rather than me-too options. This is the best way for the company to survive an intensely competitive market, Zhang told Fierce.
In May, Hengrui secured by far its single largest licensing deal courtesy of BMS. This landmark agreement spans 13 early-stage programs in oncology, hematology and immunology with a $600 million upfront payment and up to $15.2 billion of total value. In that deal, the U.S. pharma agreed to co-discover and develop five assets with Hengrui.
That agreement came less than a year after Hengrui landed a similar deal with GSK for 12 assets in respiratory, immunology, inflammation and oncology indications with a $500 million upfront payment and a total value of $12 billion.
Both deals saw Hengrui retain responsibility for all the early clinical development, with the two multinational pharmas won over by Hengrui’s in-house R&D platforms. What Hengrui brings to the table is its “discovery engine, platform technologies and efficient early-stage development expertise, enabling the advancement of a broad portfolio of high-value programs,” BMS explained at the time of its deal.
Those agreements were a validation of a key strategic decision made at Hengrui back in the early 2000s. Despite drawing its primary revenue from generics, Hengrui became one of the few Chinese pharmaceutical companies to start investing in developing new drugs.
Zhang had spent most of his career in the U.S., specializing in peptide therapeutics and drug development at Eli Lilly and GLP-1 pioneer Marcadia Biotech. But in 2010, he came back to China and joined Hengrui as its global R&D head. The goal: to transform the company’s R&D strategy into one driven by innovation.
That bet has clearly paid off, with Hengrui now one of the top innovative drug companies in China. In the first six months of 2026, Hengrui's revenue from new drugs approved in the country reached $1.3 billion, accounting for 63% of the company’s total drug revenue. This included the likes of rastuzumab rezetecan, a HER2 antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) approved in China last year for HER2-mutant non-small cell lung cancer and HER2-positive breast and colorectal cancers.
There's also dalpiciclib, an oral CDK4/6 inhibitor available for HR-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer, as well as fuzuloparib, a PARP1/2 inhibitor that's mainly used for ovarian cancer. Other exciting new drugs on the Chinese market include henagliflozin, an SGLT2 inhibitor for type 2 diabetes, and recaticimab, an anti-PCSK9 monoclonal antibody for lowering LDL cholesterol.
Besides oncology, Hengrui now has another major growth engine in the form of metabolism and cardiovascular disease treatments, which includes a franchise of GLP-1-based candidates for obesity.
“We now have the most comprehensive and differentiated pipeline [both in development and in sales] in diabetes and weight management,” Zhang told Fierce. “We can provide virtually every solution that patients need.”
In September, Hengrui landed a deal worth up to $2.6 billion with Danish pharma Novo for HRS-1596, a phase 1-ready GLP-1/GIP dual receptor agonist for once-weekly oral dosing. Announcing the agreement, which involved a $300 million payment to Hengrui, Novo's Chief Scientific Officer Martin Holst Lange, M.D., Ph.D., praised the Chinese company's “proven track record of discovering and advancing innovative therapies.”
Zhang described the focus of Hengrui’s current R&D strategy as “fast follow-on.” This involves either following “superstar” novel targets that have already been approved or creating new molecular entities with differentiated profiles.
Zhang emphasized to Fierce that the differentiation must be based on a specific unmet clinical need rather than insubstantial modifications of existing products. For example, tackling resistance or demonstrating efficacy in patients who don’t respond to existing regimens.
“This is where we’re doubling down,” Zhang said. “At the same time, we’re also putting about 30% of our energy on truly breakthrough innovations,” which means looking for “first-in-class” candidates.
“Technology platform building is also a major priority for us,” Zhang added. “Most of the time, it’s the experience ingrained within the teams.”
Hengrui now has more than 10 platforms spanning ADCs, bispecific and multispecific antibodies, protein degraders, small interfering RNA (siRNA) drugs, oral peptides, proteolysis-targeting chimeras and regulated induced proximity targeting chimeras (known as PROTACs and RIPTACs) and molecular glues.
Having those platforms is particularly important for fast-follow-on projects, because they can greatly accelerate R&D speed, Zhang explained. “For fast-follow-ons, time is life and money.”
But Hengrui's accelerated innovation and sky-high ambition still face obstacles. While outside observers may see what looks like a boom time for Chinese drug developers, the companies themselves often feel significantly more constrained financially than their international peers. Chinese biopharmas’ new drug sales have yet to catch up with the industry's innovation spurs, hindered by lengthy hospital penetration processes for trials and daunting national drug price negotiations.
It means that even with over 20 new drugs approved in China, Hengrui’s sales from these medicines still haven’t taken off as expected.
“Our ability to manage risks is still not as good, because we don’t have the foundation like ‘Big Pharmas’ yet,” Zhang explained. “We’re still in the process of transformation.”
It doesn’t help that hundreds of Chinese biotechs are concentrating on a few hot targets, such as PD-1/VEGF, or developing similar modalities such as bispecifics and ADCs. Experts from China have told Fierce that it’s not uncommon to find a handful or more companies clustered around each drug class.
“I’m very worried about the surge,” Zhang said. “It means everybody is practically doing the same thing and nobody will make the return.”
This herd mentality comes from investors wanting quick yields and Big Pharmas wanting less risk, he suggested.
But Hengrui also has to answer to demands from its own investors for bigger returns ever since the company went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May 2025. This is one of the drivers for the company's strategy of finding Big Pharmas and other Western peers to help monetize the biopharma’s assets and boost revenue by tapping into high-value markets like the U.S. and Europe.
“We believe our current highly differentiated assets should be able to meet the clinical needs abroad, too,” Zhang said. “But to be honest, a pipeline of our size is out of our financial ability to fully support the development. We need more resources.”
For fast-follow-on assets with mature targets that have established a clear differentiation, Hengrui tends to choose the New-Co pathway with partners who have the ability to assemble a team with both capital and medical expertise. “We know these types of assets will generate value as long as they gain investment,” Zhang said.
In 2024, Hengrui licensed out four of its GLP-1 assets and teamed up with its Western buyer to set up a New-Co called Kailera Therapeutics, which launched a record-breaking $625 million Nasdaq IPO earlier this year.
For newer and riskier assets, Hengrui is inclined to work with multinational companies that will invest the necessary resources for development instead of just stocking them for their pipeline.
“Choosing the right partner is very important,” Zhang explained. “It’s not always who bids the highest who gets the asset—you need chemistry.”
At the same time, Hengrui has started to launch more than a dozen multinational clinical trials overseas for key assets that the company believes will gain a global market. The U.S. is included in many of these programs.
“We, of course, really want to enter the U.S. market, so we need to generate data from there,” Zhang said. This will not only add value to those assets but help the company establish a presence in the country for the future, he explained.
Having worked in R&D in both the U.S. and China, Zhang has been closely following the relationship between the two countries. But he is not particularly concerned about the rising geopolitical tensions.
“If a drug can save a cancer patient’s life, to deny its entrance to the U.S. just because it’s from China is unthinkable and definitely unethical,” he told Fierce. “I think it’s highly unlikely to happen.”
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