Lunch Panel: Shifting Centers of Gravity in the Global Life Sciences Ecosystem

Locust Walk’s CEO and Co-Founder, Geoff Meyerson, led a discussion with, Tom Hopkins, Vice President and Head of ExploR&D at Eli Lilly, Robert Weisskoff, Senior Partner at F-Prime Capital Partners, and Debra Yu, Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Panacea Ventures.

The panel opened with a forward-looking tone, highlighting how the global life sciences landscape is becoming increasingly interconnected and competitive. Panelists explored the accelerating influence of Asia, particularly China, Japan, and South Korea—in shaping the next phase of biotech innovation. Chinese outbound licensing now represents nearly half of global deal value, underscoring the region’s growing impact. The 2025 class of Chinese biotech IPOs, up more than 200% year to date, was cited as evidence of this momentum.

Panelists agreed that speed, capital efficiency, and translational strength in Asia are reshaping the global development playbook. China’s ability to run clinical trials up to ten times faster than in the U.S., coupled with lower costs, presents major opportunities—but also new complexities. Successful engagement requires deep local knowledge, strong alliance management, and an understanding of cross-cultural execution challenges that persist long after deals are signed.

Two major themes emerged. First, companies must adopt a global mindset from inception. Embedding within regional ecosystems, through innovation hubs, incubators, and venture collaborations, enables faster development, smarter capital allocation, and regulatory agility. Panelists pointed to Asia-Pacific advantages such as Australia’s rapid trial start-up and R&D tax incentives, and South Korea’s advanced digital health infrastructure, as tangible reasons to diversify operations early.

Second, the group discussed the growing price competition in global dealmaking, particularly driven by China’s capital constraints and crowded pipelines. With U.S. dollar funding scarce, Chinese biotechs are aggressively licensing out assets at lower prices, creating both opportunity and downward pressure across the market. Despite the surge in licensing, M&A from China remains minimal—about 2% of global deal value—reflecting the preference for asset sales over full company acquisitions and ongoing hesitancy around cross-border ownership.

Panelists also addressed the strategic implications for U.S. biotechs. Companies must seek advantage wherever possible, leveraging faster trial recruitment in Asia, pairing assets across geographies, and rethinking disclosure practices. Several speakers noted a shift toward delaying publications or patent filings to protect IP amid fierce competition, even within China.

Ultimately, the discussion underscored that while geopolitical tensions and price dynamics shape the landscape, the scientific mission remains shared. The future of biotech innovation will depend on global collaboration, finding the right balance between competition, partnership, and the collective goal of delivering transformative medicines to patients worldwide.

Next-Generation Multispecific Therapeutics

Twelve companies, carefully curated through a competitive selection process, developing the next generation of multispecific therapeutics, presented their innovations, showcasing how novel modality engineering is being leveraged to address complex biological pathways and enable more precise targeting mechanisms. For this track, next-generation multi-specifics were defined as advanced modalities designed to engage two or more disease-relevant targets or pathways, representing the evolution of bispecific and tri-specific antibodies as well as immune cell engager technologies. Collectively, these approaches highlighted the growing potential of multi-specifics to redefine therapeutic precision not only in oncology but also across autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

The featured companies represented a diverse cross-section of the global biotech ecosystem, spanning private and public ownership, from seed-stage innovators to mid-cap public companies, with headquarters across the United States, Canada, China, and Southeast Asia. Modalities ranged from bi-specific and tri-specific antibodies to T-cell and immune cell engagers, covering programs from discovery to early clinical development.

Two key themes emerged throughout the Next-Generation Multi-specific Therapeutics track. First, the discussion reflected the field’s growing sophistication in fine-tuning molecular design to balance potency, selectivity, and safety. Across the next-generation cell engager space, innovators are refining CD3-based architectures to precisely modulate T-cell activation through affinity optimization and spatial control, adjusting binding strength to tumor versus immune targets to minimize cytokine release while preserving tumor lysis (Marengo, Excyte). This nuanced engineering extends to checkpoint-oriented bi-specifics, where tuning receptor engagement enables conditional activation only within the tumor microenvironment, reducing systemic immune stress (Antengene, Phanes).

A second theme centered on the integration of multi-specific and ADC technologies to maximize therapeutic precision. Developers are increasingly pairing dual- or multi-payload ADCs with modular antibody scaffolds to exploit complementary mechanisms—linking cytotoxic and immune-modulatory payloads to address both tumor cell eradication and microenvironment remodeling (VelaVigo, Vicero). In parallel, emerging multi-specific platforms are exploring three- or four-target constructs designed to overcome antigen escape and functional redundancy, while maintaining manufacturability and pharmacokinetic stability (Ichnos Glenmark Innovation, ModeX). Collectively, these efforts illustrate a clear shift toward rational, systems-level design, where controlling binding geometry, payload synergy, and immune modulation in concert defines the next frontier of multi-specific therapeutic innovation.