Nature Reviews spotlights K-biotech innovation as Hanmi Pharm, SK Biopharm join global leaders

Hanmi Pharm and SK Biopharm, two of South Korea's most prominent pharmaceutical and biotech companies, have broken away from the generic-drug model that dominates emerging markets and earned recognition as global innovation leaders, according to a comprehensive study published in a leading scientific journal. Yuhan, Daewoong Pharma, Samsung Biologics and GC Bioxcel were classified as emerging innovators closing in fast behind them.

Nature Reviews Drug Discovery — the drug development sister journal of Nature, the world's foremost scientific publication — published a paper Tuesday by author Ajay Gautam analyzing R&D productivity trends in the global pharmaceutical market. The research tracked R&D investment patterns and portfolio-transformation strategies at 45 major biopharmaceutical companies across Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa over the 15 years from 2010 to 2025.

The paper classified pharmaceutical companies in emerging markets into three tiers based on R&D spending as a share of annual sales — R&D intensity — and the proportion of innovative new drugs in their pipelines: Innovation Leaders, Emerging Innovators and Generic Players.

Only nine companies worldwide qualified as Innovation Leaders — the top tier, defined by sustained R&D investment of around 20 percent of annual sales and a portfolio on par with multinational big pharma in the United States and Europe. Two were South Korean: Hanmi Pharm and SK Biopharm. The remaining seven were Chinese firms, including Jiangsu Hengrui Medicine, Innovent Biologics and Sino Biopharmaceutical.

The Emerging Innovators tier — companies investing 8 to 12 percent of sales in R&D and raising the share of innovative assets in their portfolios to between 25 and 50 percent — comprised 10 companies. Four were South Korean: Yuhan, Daewoong Pharma, Samsung Biologics and GC Bioxcel. India's Biocon and Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, along with Eastern Europe's Gedeon Richter, were identified as peer rivals competing closely with the Korean companies in this tier.

The author highlighted Hanmi Pharm's transformation with specific metrics. The company invested roughly 10 percent of sales in R&D between 2010 and 2015, then shifted into a higher gear, lifting its average R&D-to-sales ratio to about 17 percent over the following decade. Backed by that sustained funding, Hanmi built a specialized pipeline in metabolic and rare diseases and demonstrated productivity through large-scale technology licensing deals in global markets, the paper said.

SK Biopharm was recognized as a high-value innovation leader that, unlike legacy pharmaceutical companies rooted in generics, deepened its own proprietary technology platform from the outset to build a differentiated drug pipeline and pursue global markets directly.

The paper also gave prominent treatment to Yuhan's rapid ascent. The company was a Generic Player between 2010 and 2015, spending less than 5 percent of sales on R&D, but has since sharply raised its five-year average investment rate to around 12 percent, positioning itself as a core innovator in the anticancer drug space. Daewoong Pharma, GC Bioxcel and Samsung Biologics — which has expanded its scope on the strength of its biopharmaceutical production infrastructure — were also named as emerging players accelerating their entry into global markets through portfolio diversification.

By region, South Korean and Chinese companies are driving innovation with high investment intensity, forming the two pillars of Asian biotech advancement, while Indian firms remained at the Emerging Innovator level. Pharmaceutical companies in Latin America and the Middle East still rely heavily on generics, with R&D investment rates of only 4 to 6 percent.

"Asia's biotech and pharmaceutical innovation leaders, centered on South Korea and China, are demonstrating drug development capabilities built on core areas of specialization and differentiated technology platforms," the author said, adding that these companies are expected to mount a serious challenge to US and European pharmaceutical dominance within the next few years.