With China accounting for an ever-larger share of global drug R&D innovation, RA Capital wants to make sure its portfolio biotechs aren’t missing out.
To this end, the life sciences and healthcare venture firm, which has more than $10 billion in assets under management, launched an initiative called RA Capital Swiftbridge in mid-2025. Rather than leave the work of developing relationships in China to individual companies, RA’s program is designed to support its early-stage portfolio, which includes more than 100 companies that have received private investments from the firm. Through Swiftbridge, these companies can gain access to China’s clinical trial infrastructure.
“The initial impetus is to be able to provide Chinese clinical expertise in a box to early-stage companies that don’t have bandwidth to do the work,” Josh Resnick, an RA Capital Partner who oversees Swiftbridge, told Fierce Biotech.
This should “allow portfolio companies and newcos to operate at China speed without having to build their own knowledge about China,” Resnick said.
Swiftbridge emerged out of RA’s broader network, which includes its company-creation incubator, called Raven, as well as Blackbird, a country-specific support platform that first began as a way to accelerate clinical trials and help RA portfolio companies navigate regulatory hurdles. The goal, Resnick said, is to help companies better navigate trial systems.
Resnick said Swiftbridge is the only effort of its kind launched by a VC firm to help streamline the trial and development process for portfolio companies in China, at least to his knowledge.
For early-stage startups with limited resources, launching trials in China provides an opportunity to better understand patient experience and dosing, and ideally increase the baseline value of development assets in a safe and efficient way.
“We are enthusiastic about what China and global infrastructure can bring to the industry,” Resnick said. “It’s all about getting good drugs to patients faster.”
Though still early in its development, Swiftbridge has already expanded beyond clinical trial expertise, adding functions that include business development and early-stage discovery project management to support RA’s biotechs.
This next stage of the Swiftbridge project involves a business development team focused on identifying innovative Chinese biotechs and conducting diligence on key programs as potential targets. Meanwhile, the discovery team partners with researchers to systematically explore therapeutic applications for their discoveries.
U.S. and European companies are increasingly relying on the Chinese biotech industry for early-stage medicine development. The annual number of cross-border licensing deals involving Chinese drugs increased by 120% from 42 in 2022 to 93 in 2025, according to Evaluate data. Over the same period, the average upfront value of those arrangements increased by roughly 400%, from $1.1 billion in 2022 to $5.6 billion last year.
China’s clinical trial resources provide another opportunity to gain an edge. A report from SynBioBeta found that in 2025, China launched between 7,100 and 7,700 trials, compared to 6,300 in the U.S. Meanwhile, China’s first-in-human approval timeline fell from 501 days before 2015 to a current wait of less than three months. Running a trial in China is up to 60% cheaper than in the U.S., according to GlobalData.
But Swiftbridge is growing amid an environment in which American companies working with Chinese biotechs face increased scrutiny, with growing calls from U.S. lawmakers and other stakeholders to curb the growth of China’s biopharma sector. Suggestions have included adding biotech to the implementation of the COINS Act, which restricts U.S. outbound investments in certain sensitive technology fields.
Resnick is skeptical of the impact such a move would have.
“If a U.S. ban severed that bridge between the U.S. and China—yes, it would make all U.S.-based companies less efficient and less competitive, including our portfolio companies,” he said.
This mentality “wouldn’t just be bad for us, but for U.S. patients and the U.S. economy, without really slowing China down,” Resnick added.
While Swiftbridge helps American biotechs launch trials and grow their businesses in China, RA Capital’s strategy does not extend to finding ways to market drugs in the country.
Instead, the ability to execute trials in China and build clinical data allows RA to de-risk and eventually accelerate development timelines by establishing a track record before launching more expensive trials in the U.S. While Swiftbridge is still in the early stages of building out its capabilities, Resnick said the initiative is already a sign of how important Chinese biotech infrastructure has become.
“The default for every company should be to seek out efficiencies everywhere,” he said. “A company should have a good reason if it doesn’t have a China strategy, not simply a lack of familiarity.”