China biotech outlicensing surges as AbbVie strikes $745m Haisco pain deal

China’s cross-border outlicensing activities reached a record transaction value of US$60 billion in the first quarter of 2026, driven by multinational pharmaceutical companies’ growing appetite for the country’s promising drug candidates. AbbVie has cut a deal worth up to $745m with Chinese biopharmaceutical company Haisco to bolster its pain pipeline amid the company’s wider asset restocking efforts. The deal value in the first quarter represented a 73 per cent jump from the same period a year earlier, and accounted for nearly half of the total US$135.7 billion worth of agreements signed throughout 2025.

Through the AbbVie-Haisco agreement, AbbVie will hand over $30m upfront and up to $715m in milestone payments to secure the development, manufacturing and commercialisation rights to several drugs in Haisco’s pain pipeline outside of China, Hong Kong and Macau. If any of these were to make it to market, Haisco would also receive an undisclosed proportion of tiered royalties on future net sales of any therapies. According to Haisco, the deal includes multiple compounds that aim to treat pain-related conditions, all of which have progressed to the preclinical or early clinical development stages in China.

Outlicensing agreements typically involve a company granting another firm the exclusive rights to further develop, manufacture and commercialise a drug once it has entered human clinical trials, in return for upfront payments, milestone fees and royalties on future sales. While neither AbbVie nor Haisco have shared further details on the assets involved in the agreement, Haisco has developed multiple pain-related assets in recent years, including HSK-55718, a NaV1.8-targeting abdominal post-operative pain injectable, which is being evaluated in healthy volunteers through a Chinese Phase I study.

AbbVie inked the deal with Haisco as the company contends with the loss of Humira’s exclusive market reign, with biosimilar erosion first beginning in 2023 after a patent thicket maintained the drug’s market exclusivity for two decades. Humira sales are estimated to drop by over 90% from the drug’s peak 2022 sales of $21.2bn by 2032. In January 2026, AbbVie signed a deal worth up to $5.6bn with Chinese company RemeGen, securing rights to a PD-1/VEGF bispecific antibody, RC148.

Many companies are turning to China to restock their pipelines in a cost-effective manner, as the country is becoming increasingly revered as an up-and-coming leader in innovative drug development. In 2024, large pharma licensed 28% of its innovator drugs from China. Innovative drugs were expected to grow at an annualised pace of 20 per cent between 2026 and 2030 in mainland China, before slowing to 8.8 per cent from 2030 to 2040.