With a highly concentrated population, a single-payer system, and vast hospital capacity (90,000 beds in Seoul vs. 4,000 in Boston), South Korea offers a significant advantage for clinical development. This infrastructure allows trials to be completed 40% faster and at 40% lower cost compared to the US.

US biotechs increasingly use sites like Australia to accelerate development, as Create Medicines did by moving from concept to clinic in under 12 months. What was once viewed with suspicion is now a key strategy to generate data faster and more cheaply, competing with the speed of China's ecosystem.

While the FDA is often blamed for high trial costs, a major culprit is the consolidated Clinical Research Organization (CRO) market. These entrenched players lack incentives to adopt modern, cost-saving technologies, creating a structural bottleneck that prevents regulatory modernization from translating into cheaper and faster trials.

Early-stage biotech companies struggle to navigate clinical development for autoimmune diseases. Disease-specific foundations hold crucial insights on patient subsets, recruitment, and key opinion leaders, yet the interface between VCs and these foundations is often inefficient and difficult to navigate, leading to missed opportunities and flawed trial execution.

While AI holds long-term promise for molecule discovery, its most significant near-term impact in biotech is operational. The key benefits today are faster clinical trial recruitment and more efficient regulatory submissions. The revolutionary science of AI-driven drug design is still in its earliest stages.

While AI can accelerate the ideation phase of drug discovery, the primary bottleneck remains the slow, expensive, and human-dependent clinical trial process. We are already "drowning in good ideas," so generating more with AI doesn't solve the fundamental constraint of testing them.

China's ability to accelerate biotech development stems from faster patient recruitment for clinical trials. With a large, treatment-naive patient population willing to participate in studies, early-stage oncology trials can be completed in about half the time it takes in the US. This provides a significant strategic advantage for de-risking assets more quickly and cheaply.

To de-risk clinical programs from recruitment and activation hurdles within the UK's strained NHS, companies like Resolution Therapeutics run an equal number of trial sites in other countries, like Spain. This geographic diversification provides a valuable real-time benchmark and a hedge against single-country operational delays.

Amidst growing uncertainty at the US FDA, biotech companies are using a specific de-risking strategy: conducting early-stage clinical trials in countries like South Korea and Australia. This global approach is not just about cost but a deliberate move to get fast, reliable early clinical data to offset domestic regulatory instability and gain a strategic advantage.