From The Trenches

By Julia Pian, Senior Associate at Atlas Venture, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC

If you are an avid consumer of biopharma news, you are probably all too familiar with the graphs that plot the growth of the Chinese Biopharma industry from number of clinical trials starts to out-licensing volume over the last five years. But that’s looking backward. The real question is what’s coming in the next five years.

On September 18, a group of Chinese government agencies released the Plan for the Development of the Pharmaceutical Industry under the 15th Five-Year Plan or 15-5 (十五五) for short. The CCP has released five-year plans since 1953 to set economy-wide priorities. The 2026 Pharmaceutical Industry specific plan lays out quantitative goals for the growth of the industry over the next five years (2026-2030), describes actions in the ecosystem to help achieve those goals, and finally, articulates key technologies and areas of the industry for future growth.

The Western press coverage I have seen to date has highlighted the KPIs set out for Chinese Biopharma at the beginning of the Plan, calling them ambitious. But set against the ecosystem’s current trajectory, I think China is already well on track to hit them by 2030. Even beyond the headline numbers, the Plan sketches out China’s vision for its biopharmaceutical industry: more measured aspirations in terms of commercial prowess with full focus on positioning China as the leading early-stage innovator in biopharma.

Setting Achievable Growth Expectations

The Plan leads with concrete goals for the Chinese Biopharma industry to achieve by 2030, which span from early innovation to commercial-stage pharmaceutical growth. Overall, the indicators seem eminently achievable, especially on the commercial side.

Table 1. Commercial Goals from 十五五 against the current state of the Chinese Biopharma Ecosystem

Moving from the current 2 blockbuster products, Brukinsa and Carvykti, to 5 by 2030 requires only 3 new blockbuster products, and BeOne’s Tevimbra ($737M sales in 2025), Akeso’s Ivonescimab, and Kelun/Merck’s Sac-TMT are poised to help achieve that goal. Hengrui’s HRS9531 (global rights licensed to Atlas portfolio company Kailera) is currently under review for NDA in China and could even be near blockbuster status from domestic sales alone (per analyst projections). Adding 17 pharmaceutical enterprises with revenue over $1.5B USD is also achievable given that 7 companies already had revenues between $1-$1.5B USD in 2025. Finally, on the overall operating revenue, utilizing Chinese government statistics, the industry is already well on track to pass the milestone. Going from 2025 operating revenue of ~$439B to the goal of $520B in 2030 only requires a ~3.4% growth rate each year, and over the last 5 years, China has already achieved a 4.1% growth rate.

On the development side, one could argue that Chinese Biopharma has already checked the boxes. China is indisputably a world leader in drugs entering clinical trials with sources reporting that in 2025, 46% of new molecules in clinical trials came from China and 50% of all innovative drug clinical trials were run by Chinese companies.

The headline number of >25% of global first-in-class drugs originating in China by 2030 is the most concrete proof of China’s aspirations to move beyond the fast-follower strategy and toward leading biology globally. Frankly, where this number actually sits today is difficult to pin down. The Chinese Biopharma bulls say that China is already there. Caixin, a Chinese business and financial news group, has published that China’s count of first-in-class candidates entering clinical trials rose to 120 by 2024, and claims that number represents 24% of the world’s FIC drug pipeline. Unfortunately, I don’t have the denominator here to prove that claim. The bears express concern that China won’t be at 25% even by 2030, often citing the need for stronger basic science research capacity.

Overall, the quantitative goals set out in the Plan seem relatively tame and well within reach. This reads to me as the Chinese Biopharma ecosystem getting comfortable in its growing position on the global stage and turning its focus to sustaining the steady growth that previous investment already built.

Ecosystem Building to Drive the Next Stage of Innovation

Beyond the numerical goals, the Plan lays out a roadmap to bolster the industry’s growth. The CCP’s focus on first-in-class products is evident in some of the highlighted research areas, including precision medicine and utilizing ‘omics work to uncover novel targets. And it would hardly be 2026 without an emphasis on integrating AI into biological research, drug discovery, and broader pharmaceutical and healthcare operations. AI relies on data, and the document even includes proactive advice on data management, encouraging the production of “trusted data spaces” to allow health data to circulate among various biopharma stakeholders.

The CCP demonstrates its understanding of some of the key ingredients to spark early innovation, including fostering hubs like Suzhou’s BioBAY or Kendall Square that bridge academics, hospitals, and industry. Now that biopharma has been declared a national emerging pillar industry, provincial governments are even further incentivized to want a hub in their backyard.

One major ingredient to novel biological innovation, however, is left unmentioned: academic funding. The 2026 Pharmaceutical Industry Plan was sponsored by 10 different government departments, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Medical Products Administration, and even the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs! However, the Ministry of Science and Technology, which administers China’s basic research programs and national science foundation, is notably absent from this document, despite being part of the last Five-Year Plan. In fact, the 14^th Five-Year Plan had set a goal of basic research taking up over 8% of R&D by 2025, but China missed that goal with basic research ending up at only ~7% of the Chinese R&D budget. Without investment at the basic science level, China’s first-in-class ambitions may be more difficult to achieve. Increasing the abundance of translatable academic science through increased academic funding will be key to driving the next stage of innovation.

China on the Global Stage

The Plan explicitly calls for “upgrading the level of industrial cooperation” beyond China’s borders. That cooperation should be bidirectional, with China leveraging its existing sphere of influence externally while continuing to attract international investment and collaboration into the country.

On bringing foreign interest into China, the CCP wants to specifically leverage the size of the domestic market to pull foreign pharma into deeper investment in China across R&D, clinical translation and manufacturing, in addition to encouraging joint R&D and joint commercialization. Although the threat of Chinese government action against foreign investment continues to loom large, this is one encouraging signal that the CCP sees the value that foreign collaboration has brought to the ecosystem to date.

On the other hand, many have wondered when Chinese pharmas will begin to deliver on their aspirations to become truly global multi-national commercial players, a question BioCentury took up just this week. BeOne is proof that a company with deep Chinese roots can get to real global commercial scale given the requisite time and resources (though it has now redomiciled to Switzerland). However, rather than aiming to juice commercial growth, the Plan more modestly proposes that Chinese Biopharma “cultivate international leading enterprises in market segments,” which reads more as a call for a healthy mid-cap pharma ecosystem rather than an attempt to build rivals to the top Western MNCs. The CCP seems to want steady and measured commercial gains, while keeping the focus on positioning China more and more as the leading global early innovation engine.

What’s on The Shopping List for the Next 5 Years?

The areas of interest articulated in the Plan read like a shopping list of hot topics in biotech. From technologies where China is already among the leaders (ADCs, nucleic acids, and cell/gene therapy) to more novel areas like macrocyclics and nanomedicine technologies, the Plan is evidence of deep technical understanding at the government level. For example, tumor microenvironment technologies are specifically and repeatedly mentioned throughout. A few themes stood out to me.

Delivery and route of administration are repeatedly brought up as an area of interest with multiple different technologies to achieve more convenient administration. This includes oral cyclic peptides, oral absorption enhancers, controlled release/long-acting technology, and mucosal administration (particularly for pediatric drug delivery and vaccines).

Unsurprisingly, conjugates are a consistent theme and appear to be the technology of choice, allowing modularity with bispecifics/multispecific antibodies or peptides dragging small molecules, radionuclides, siRNA, and ASOs to target tissues or tumors of interest.

Although many therapeutic areas are mentioned across the document, infectious disease is noted repeatedly across many sections, including as a priority area, with prophylactic vaccines for viruses such as RSV and Zoster being highlighted. Technology developments are called for with new vaccine adjuvants, combination vaccines and genetically recombinant vaccines. This is perhaps not surprising given the national security importance of infectious disease, and could be one area to watch for innovation coming out of China in the near future.

China has many state-affiliated investment funds that I imagine will use the 5-Year Plan as an investment mandate, so consider this a potential preview of the new technology platforms and novel assets that we will see emerging from China over the next 5 years.

Finally, there is one particularly interesting goal articulated near the end of the document: enhancing the social value of the pharmaceutical industry and cultivating the cultural value of the pharmaceutical industry. As it relates to the modern pharmaceutical industry, China explicitly aims to strengthen public awareness and understanding of pharmaceutical industry innovation and advancement through both school and public communication. There is a specific stated aim of more “cultural soft power” for the industry. I have deliberately refrained from comparing Chinese and American Biopharma up to this point, but given that 58% of Americans viewed the pharmaceutical industry negatively according to the 2026 Gallup poll, the US could probably pay attention to how China goes about trying to achieve its goal of better public understanding of what this sector contributes to society.

In conclusion, China will continue to loom large in the biopharma industry, so understanding how the CCP is thinking about the next 5 years is step one in crafting the best way to engage. The Plan, 十五五, is rich with many more details, from encouraging increased clinical trial enablement at clinical research centers to building shared manufacturing capabilities to lower the barrier for technology derisking. However, I hope you take two things from this appetizer:

1. Ultimately, China knows its strong position in the global biopharma ecosystem and is actively taking steps to hold it by advocating for the industry to move upstream to become originators of biological innovation. Whether these aspirations will be realized may hinge, at least in part, on the level of support that China pours into its academic research capacity.
2. Rather than pushing to accelerate China’s global commercial footprint, this Plan seems to recognize the value of cross-border collaboration in bringing what the government hopes will be Chinese-originated innovation out to the world. The CCP seems to be signaling tacit agreement to continued robust East-West biopharma collaboration, at least for the next five years.

Let’s see how these predictions land in 2030. I’m taking the over.

Special thanks to Tao Lan for sharing his expertise and read of the 5-Year Plan and Alex Harding for his feedback on this piece!

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By Arthur Tzianabos, CEO of Lifordi Immunotherapeutics, as part of the From The Trenches feature of LifeSciVC

If you ask anyone who has run a drug development program what factors determine whether it succeeds or not, the answer is rarely just “the science.” It often depends on the people running the program and if they work well together, as well as whether the company has clarity on where the goalposts are and who is accountable for what.  Program Management should play a critical role in creating that clarity and alignment, ensuring that the organization is aligned on the strategy, goals, development plan, and timelines. This function also drives effective cross-functional decision-making and reinforces accountability for delivering against agreed-upon commitments. This is true within seven-person startups or companies of more than 5,000 people.

Program Management is an essential but often overlooked function that can greatly enhance the success rate of drug development programs.  Importantly, a successful Program Management function relies heavily on experienced and savvy operators who comprise this organization. LifeSciVC blogs written by me and many others highlight reasons why drug development often fails. What I believe is one of the most damning and yet avoidable reasons why our medicines can fail to make it to patients lies in the lack of understanding of the value that the Program Management function can bring to companies both large and small. To underscore this point, if you search on ‘Program Management’ under the From the Trenches tab on the LifeSciVC website, you will find ZERO hits on this topic.

As a former VP of Program Management and ultimately SVP and Head of Research and Early Development at Shire ──with over 5,000 employees and programs ranging from discovery to marketed drugs, I learned firsthand how a lack of cooperation, integration and team imbalance could destroy programs. Over my career as a CEO, Board Chair/Member, and Venture Partner, I have worked with companies that have mastered Program Management and who have also successfully hired and developed dozens of program leaders. In reflecting on my own experiences and consulting with some of the best Program Executives in the business, here I have endeavored to convey a clear picture of what separates great Program Management from not-so-great.

Two Roles, One Program

It starts with understanding two very different jobs that have to work as one. In some cases, one person has to serve both roles for a program, which is not ideal but sometimes necessary given resource constraints.  Ideally, every development program should have a Program Lead (PL) and a Program Manager (PM), and the simplest way to understand the split is this: the PL functions much like the CEO of the program, and the PM as its Chief Operating Officer (COO).

Typically, the PL is accountable for the program development strategy. They weigh the organization’s goals against technical considerations, the competitive landscape and the disease area. Then they build out scenario plans and alternate pathways, as well as drive cross-functional alignment around the direction the program should take.

The PM works with the team to build the cross-functional operating plan. They ensure key risks are flagged and appropriate mitigation plans are in place, maintain cross-functional timelines, and manage the practical machinery — think of it as running point on how the strategy actually gets executed. This PL/PM partnership is critical to create the right conditions and culture for the broader team to succeed.

What to Look For

A great PL or PM doesn’t necessarily need an advanced degree in health science, though a strong technical foundation certainly helps. What matters most is the ability to bring both a technical and business “lens” to the program — paired with genuine intellectual curiosity. Three things tend to separate the great ones from the rest:

Relevant background — but watch for bias

It helps enormously when someone has “been there, done that” —lived through phased drug development, taken a molecule from Phase 1 to Phase 3 or to market, and understands how the process evolves. But background can cut both ways. A PL who comes up through a single function — say, a Chief Medical Officer (CMO) or clinical lead — can bring real depth, but also real bias, and may struggle to see the full commercial or operational picture. Someone from Research might be light on development experience. The key is in the pairing: the PL and PM should bring complementary strengths, experiences, and perspectives, with each helping to balance the other’s potential gaps or biases.

High Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

Programs run on people, and a PL or PM who rubs people the wrong way will stall a program regardless of technical skill. The best ones are diplomats that do not kowtow or crumble under stress. They learn how each stakeholder operates, and — critically — they bring people together instead of driving them apart or playing one against the other.

Credentialed intelligence aside, these are the people that show up as fast learning, sharp analysis, and a hunger to keep pushing boundaries rather than defaulting to “this is how it’s always been done.” A Program Executive I know once hired a PL that primarily had commercial industry experience to lead an early-stage development program and she was highly successful. Another former Program Executive hired someone from regulatory operations with a psychology degree and no formal science degree. That person became one of the most successful PMs because she worked extremely well with people, knew what she didn’t know and moved fast to close the gap.

When interviewing candidates for these roles, one useful line of questioning is simply:

Tell me about a time you drove a decision. What was at stake? What was your approach? How did you analyze it? What was your process? What was the outcome? What would you do differently? The answers reveal far more about how someone actually thinks and operates than any resume line.

How this Works Day to Day

A well-run PL/PM relationship has a rhythm to it. The PL gets the right people in a room to form the Program Team — representatives from Clinical, Chemistry, Manufacturing and Controls (CMC), Research, Non-clinical, Clinical Pharmacology, Regulatory, and Commercial  and potentially folks from additional functions depending on stage of development — and drives toward alignment. That means more than assigning responsibilities on paper; it means people actually acting in their roles, with clear expectations for the behaviors the program needs from them. Program leaders function well when they can act independently reporting directly into the CEO in a smaller company or to the COO in larger organizations. In this way, no one function takes the lead and deliverables for all aspects of the program remain clear.

Often, the default for some companies is to have the Head of Clinical or a representative from Clinical be the PL for a program. It should be no surprise then that his/her needs can drive decisions, and the lack of integration, coordination, and attention to detail can suffer. I’ve seen instances where Clinical may not know things like the difference between drug product and drug substance, how long it takes to get from one to the other, or what the lead time is from start to fill-finish. Conversely, CMC may not know the rationale behind a dosing schedule change, only that it will require more or less drug and when. The misunderstandings and blurred responsibilities often result in missed milestones, wasted drug batches and poor team dynamics  — a ‘blame game’ is inevitable.

In the model I have seen work best, the PL or PM takes a holistic view of the program and translates the strategy into an integrated development plan with clear timelines, tracks progress and risks, ensures appropriate mitigation and timely escalation when needed. The PL/PM also keeps the various program activities connected, coordinating across sub-teams and managing program team meetings, communications, and information flow. Program Management works within the company’s established matrix and governance structure to enable effective planning, decision-making, and execution.

A few things distinguish programs that run smoothly from ones that don’t:

• Confidence from leadership. The Executive Team needs to trust how decisions are being made and see clear cross-functional buy-in. Without that, meetings turn into ambushes — a CMO or Head of R&D challenging the PL, or a PM caught flat-footed and unable to defend the plan. This is why the broader team needs to have the PM’s back before they ever walk into that room.
• Executive Team meetings should feel like rubber stamps, not drawn-out debates. If a leadership review turns into an extended argument, something upstream has broken down. Program Management that is too junior for the role will waste leadership’s time and struggle to read the room.
• Clarity on goalposts. Programs stall when leaders aren’t honest about constraints or are afraid to name the pain points — in Regulatory, CMC, Clinical, wherever they exist. There’s no perfect solution in drug development. Pretending otherwise just produces analysis paralysis.

One more thing successful Program Management tends to have: a champion on the Executive Team — ideally the CEO — who understands and values the role. Program Management absorbs a lot of pressure, and functions best when cross-functional alignment happens continuously, not just in the room. The goal is always to avoid surprises at the leadership level, or in one program manager’s words, “the cut your legs out from under you moments.”  Once someone gets blindsided in front of the Exec Team that trust is hard to rebuild.

It’s also worth asking what happens to a PL or PM whose program isn’t the company’s top priority — the “stepchild” program, so to speak. The best organizations treat this as a development opportunity rather than a demotion: sharing learnings from the priority programs, keeping the B-team managers engaged with regulatory feedback and cross-functional insights, and actively preparing them to run a priority program when the time comes. Everyone benefits.

Why Decision-Making Breaks Down

Even a strong PL/PM pair can’t fully insulate a program from bad decisions made higher up. In biopharma, decisions themselves are complex, cross-functional, and made under real uncertainty. When decision-making breaks down, it usually follows a few predictable patterns:

Structural Flaws

• No clear owner. When it’s unclear who’s actually driving a decision — and which stakeholders need to weigh in — the result is tension, delay, and duplicated work.
• No overarching strategy. Without a clear portfolio-level strategy, program decisions drift away from corporate priorities because there’s no framework to weigh them against.
• Under-resourced programs. A program that isn’t treated as a priority often doesn’t get the leadership attention it needs to make timely calls, which becomes a self-fulfilling prognosis.

Unrealistic Planning

• Shifting goalposts. Decisions get revisited endlessly when success criteria, risk tolerance, and financial constraints were never made explicit up front. Sometimes that reflects new data. Just as often, it reflects not being realistic early enough about what’s actually feasible.
• Unrealistic assumptions. Timelines, budgets, and probability-of-success estimates that aren’t grounded in reality set programs up to fail.

Execution Resistance

• Fear of the imperfect option. Some decisions only offer tradeoffs. Leaders who keep searching for a perfect option end up stuck in analysis paralysis instead.
• Limited trust in the team. When executives do not trust a team’s recommendation — often because the team is under-experienced or under-coached — they re-litigate decisions in the weeds instead of trusting the process.

Tips for Developing Cross-Functional Alignment

Drawing from experiences running early-stage to late-stage drug development including rare-disease programs, these core principles will help round out the picture:

Operational Best Practices

• Build relationships before you need them: Cultivate cross-functional relationships early — gather signal from discovery research long before it becomes formal data and understand each function’s real constraints (how long certain experiments take, when CMC material can realistically be available) rather than assuming timelines can simply be compressed.
• Stagger programs deliberately: Programs succeed and fail at different points in their lifecycle. Careful staggering avoids “dead space” where the organization has nothing moving forward.
• Be skeptical of data used to defend a position: Teams often present data to support their preferred conclusion, but the underlying data are rarely as clean as the narrative suggests. Good program leadership knows the difference.

Strategic Approach

• Start with the patient and work backward: The strongest programs pair patient need with the promise of the biology and work out from there — what the preclinical program needs to demonstrate, what the clinic can realistically deliver, and what regulators will actually require.  Example: A past program needed to show a direct clinical benefit, but the relevant disease phenotype in animal models only emerged too late for the company’s timeline to sustain. That mismatch between biological reality and program feasibility must surface early.
• Involve all functions from day one: Biology, Clinical, Regulatory, CMC, Business Development, Commercial, and Patient Advocacy should be at the table from the start. Waiting to loop in Commercial or Patient Advocacy almost always costs more.
• Track competitors but don’t be limited by them: A differentiated technology or approach can solve what others couldn’t. Just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it can’t be done now if the right science, tools, and regulatory environment are finally converging. Challenging the status quo and leaving room for serendipity is valuable — but have a clear ‘go/no-go’ timeframe so exploration doesn’t become indefinite delay.

With all this laid out, you might ask what we do at Lifordi Immunotherapeutics for Program Management?  We are a very small company (<15 people) working on developing ADCs for I&I indications.  The Phase 1a healthy participant study was completed earlier this year in Australia. We are now enrolling patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis in Eastern Europe and initial data is expected at the end of this year.  So there are a lot of moving parts with the program including global supply chain challenges caused by the ongoing conflicts in this region of the world.

Currently, we have external consulting PM support with our CMO serving as the PL and the management team working together to review the program every week.    As we transition to a global Phase 2 trial, we will need to re-evaluate how the Program Team is set up to maximize efficiency and communication between the functions.  Ultimately, Program Management needs to be flexible to meet the needs of the company and its goals.

Getting with the Program

None of this is really about process for its own sake. It’s not about just knowing how to develop and manage a Gantt chart  — although I’ve always been impressed by people who maneuver these well, especially on the fly during team meetings. It’s really all about understanding the power of Program Management. Get the team right, back them with leadership support, and build a solid structure with clear governance, honest constraints, and genuine cross-functional trust. This will enable a lot of the decision-making and execution problems that plague drug development programs to become more efficient, and you dramatically increase your probability of success.  When you ‘Get with the Program’ you can ‘Manage’ to get good science to patients.

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