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.
Through this 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.
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According to Haisco, this 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.
While neither AbbVie nor Haisco have shared further details on the assets involved in this agreement, the latter company has developed multiple pain-related assets in recent years. This includes HSK-55718 – a NaV1.8-targeting abdominal post-operative pain (PoP) injectable – which is being evaluated in healthy volunteers through a Chinese Phase I study (CTR20255036), as per GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center.
In a 13 April statement, Haisco’s CEO, Dr Pangke Yan, noted that collaboration was central to the biopharma’s international development strategy, and would likely “generate sustainable value and long-term returns” for Haisco.
Patent cliff sees big pharma seek Chinese assets
AbbVie inks this deal with Haisco as the company contends with the loss of Humira’s (adalimumab) exclusive market reign – with biosimilar erosion first beginning in 2023 after a patent thicket maintained the drug’s market exclusivity for two decades.
GlobalData estimates that Humira sales will drop by over 90% from the drug’s peak 2022 sales of $21.2bn by 2032. It is therefore clear that AbbVie must find new assets to replenish its portfolio to offset these losses. At the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, AbbVie noted that its immunology and neuroscience portfolios would be strong future growth drivers for the company, with Skyrizi (risankizumab) and Rinvoq (upadacitinib) forecast to generate over $41bn in sales by 2031.
However, the company has also diversified its oncology portfolio in recent months. In January 2026, the US pharma company signed a deal worth up to $5.6bn with the Chinese company, RemeGen, which saw it secure the rights to the latter’s PD-1/VEGF bispecific antibody, RC148.
AbbVie’s pipeline restocking efforts reflect a wider industry trend towards pipeline fortification, as a report from GlobalData, parent company of Pharmaceutical Technology, forecasts that the US drug market will lose over $230bn in revenue between 2025 and 2030 due to key patent expirations.
Amid this loss, 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. This is primarily due to the country’s ballooning output of innovative, first or best-in-class medicines, marking a shift away from the country’s prior focus on generic medicines. In 2024, large pharma licensed 28% of its innovator drugs from China.
In a previous conversation with Pharmaceutical Technology, experts noted that high-value oncology and immunology-focused deals would likely drive China’s continued licensing boom.
