The rovadicitinib deal is about more than one blood-cancer and transplant asset. It is another sign that global pharma is no longer treating China mainly as a market to sell into, but increasingly as a market to source from.
When Sanofi agreed to pay up to $1.53 billion for global rights to rovadicitinib from Sino Biopharmaceutical’s Chia Tai Tianqing unit, the headline looked straightforward: another multinational pharma company buying optionality around a promising specialty-care asset. But that reading is too narrow. The more consequential story is where the molecule came from, how quickly it was de-risked,
