This week the biggest gathering in my industry is taking place in my hometown, and I am more than 6,000 miles away. BIO, the convention that pulls the drug business together every June, is in San Diego. I am in Taipei, on the far side of the Pacific, and I am glad to be here. I came on a life-sciences trade mission hosted by TAITRA and the United States, representing our country, with two jobs: to bring an American business and investment lens to Taiwan's biotech companies, and to look hard at what they have that an American drug developer should want. I made the trade because Taiwan's next export to the United States may not be silicon chips.
While the chips soared, biotech sank
Everyone I tell about the trip brings up the same thing: chips. TSMC, the supply chain, the silicon shield that is supposed to keep the island safe. The point of view is correct and incomplete. Underneath the chips, Taiwan has spent two decades building a life-sciences industry, and most American drug developers have never looked. The reasons are ordinary. The chips cast a long shadow. The data in English is thin, so the sector is hard to see from a desk in Boston or San Diego. And when American firms think about biotech deals in Asia, the reflex is Japan, then Korea, then China. Taiwan rarely makes the short list.
Look at what that inattention has done to the price. While the AI boom more than doubled Taiwan's stock market across 2023, 2024 and 2025, the island's listed biotechs went the other way. OBI Pharma has lost about two-thirds of its value; peers like Medigen and EirGenix have slid as well, even as American biotech rallied off its 2022 lows. Taiwan's drug companies caught none of it.
So the sector is cheap, and not by a little. Taiwan's biotech and pharmaceutical industry earned about $24.5 billion in 2023, and its 134 listed firms are worth roughly $42.4 billion combined, a little over 1.7 times revenue. The American biotech and pharmaceutical sector trades near 5.9 times. On its face that is a 70 percent discount. The comparison is not clean. Taiwan's revenue includes medical devices, generics and contract manufacturing, which earn lower multiples everywhere; its drug pipelines are earlier-stage; and its thin trading volume makes the gap look wider than it is. Adjust for all of that and the discount shrinks.
What remains after that adjustment is the interesting part. The discount is structural, not a judgment on the Taiwanese science. Foreign investors have no easy way to buy these companies. TSMC has crowded out every other Taiwan story for a decade. And the deal-making that would carry a Taiwanese drug to a Western buyer has not been built at any scale. The market is not saying the assets are bad. It is saying no one can reach them. That is what a mispricing looks like, and it is the kind that gets closed by people who build deals, not by a stock screen.
The chip playbook, in biology
Taiwan did not stumble into semiconductors. In the 1980s a state laboratory, the Industrial Technology Research Institute, picked spots in the chip supply chain and spun them out as companies. United Microelectronics came first. TSMC followed in 1987, built on technology licensed from Philips of the Netherlands. The method was deliberate: use public research to find a niche, hand the technology to a private company, and let it grow into a champion.
Taiwan is now running the same play in biology, and saying so out loud. In 2023 the government seeded the Taiwan Bio-Manufacturing Corporation, or TBMC, through that same laboratory and a sister center, built on production technology licensed from the American firm National Resilience. The echo of the 1987 Philips deal is exact, and Taiwanese officials make it themselves: TBMC's goal, modeled openly on the success of TSMC, is to become a contract factory for mRNA, cell and gene therapies instead of chips. In June 2025 it broke ground on Taiwan's first plant for nucleic-acid medicines, with production due to begin in 2026 and a fuller build-out to follow.
This is the point where the story usually gets oversold, so I will be plain. TBMC is a bet under construction, not a working champion. The plant is months old. Mass production is years away. Taiwan has not repeated its chip success in medicine, and anyone who tells you it has is selling something. What it has done is move the method, public research to find the niche and contract manufacturing to scale it, into a credible biologics business. That is real, and it is early.
What makes it matter to an American is the politics laid on top. In the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade signed in February, Taiwan promised to keep its research inside the American technology orbit, including a pledge to sign nothing with China on biotechnology, artificial intelligence or quantum computing. Read that twice. Taiwan has tied the future of its biotech research to the United States and away from the giant next door.
Call it the bio shield. The silicon shield protects Taiwan by making the world depend on its chips; knock the island offline and you choke the supply of advanced semiconductors. The bio shield carries that logic into medicine. A Taiwan that makes allied mRNA, cell and gene therapies, holds one of the deepest precision-medicine datasets anywhere, and is barred by treaty from sharing it with China becomes load-bearing for Western biosecurity, the way it already is for computing. The first shield is about deterrence. The second is about trust, about whom you will let make the medicines you cannot afford to buy from an adversary. February's agreement is the moment Taiwan asked to stand inside that line.
What Taiwan actually brings
Set the analogy aside and look at the assets. Four are worth an American developer's attention.
The first is manufacturing. EirGenix already runs a commercial biologics plant in Zhubei built for twelve 2,000-liter bioreactors. The bigger bet is TBMC, and the right comparison is Korean. Samsung Biologics, also government-seeded, listed in 2016 at about $8 billion and is now worth more than $40 billion, on roughly $3 billion in annual revenue. TBMC is that playbook moved to Taiwan, aimed at the fastest-growing corner of the market: the biologics contract-manufacturing business is already worth tens of billions a year and growing fast, with cell and gene therapy faster still. TBMC has no revenue and has published no projections, and full production is still years off, so no one can responsibly put a value on the company. The market beneath it is not in question.
The second is data. In December 2025 Academia Sinica's Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative published two papers in the journal Nature describing a study of more than 560,000 people, one of the largest biobanks of its kind, built on gene arrays tuned to Han Chinese genetics and linked to decades of national health records. For anyone building companion diagnostics, or training models on clinical data, that is a rare asset, and it rests on the computing strengths Taiwan already has.
The third is government money. Taiwan's National Development Fund co-invests in industries the state wants to grow, and a separate NT$100 billion fund exists to pull in private capital. A 2023 tax change lets companies judged critical to the global supply chain claim a 25 percent credit on forward-looking research, a clause written with advanced manufacturers like contract drug factories in mind. The government is backing the thesis with public money, as it once did for chips.
The fourth is policy. February's agreement says Taiwan will accept US FDA marketing authorizations for American-made drugs and devices, and will drop tariffs on American generics to zero. A caveat, because this is easy to inflate: the deal is chip-first. There is no dedicated biotech fund, no investment target, no clause on licensing drugs. The drug provisions are real but secondary. Even so, accepting an FDA authorization removes a step that used to cost months, and that matters to anyone moving a drug between the two markets.
The missing piece is not money
This is what I came to test. The gap between what Taiwan has and what gets developed in America is not capital, and it is not science. It is the work of putting a deal together.
The proof is in the deal flow, or the lack of it. Taiwanese companies say openly that they want partners. OBI Pharma, Oneness and the spinouts from the research institute all have assets, and all want to license them out. Yet the signed, named deals are few. The clearest recent one is OBI Pharma's exclusive global license of an antibody-drug conjugate to an American company, TegMine, in December 2025. That is most of the list for licensing from Taiwan to the United States over the past two years. Set it beside greater China, where out-licensing ran to about $138 billion across 186 deals in 2025, almost all from the mainland. Taiwan is a rounding error in that figure, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to lose a room of people who know better.
So the bottleneck is execution: the structure of an out-licensing deal, the work of turning a Taiwanese clinical file into an FDA submission, a manufacturing-quality bar that smaller plants have failed before, and the trust it takes for two companies that have never worked together to sign a first deal whose value is mostly a promise. None of it is glamorous. All of it is what turns a list of willing sellers into real transactions, and on this route it is the part in short supply.
Here is a concrete version. An American drug company that signs a capacity agreement with TBMC now is buying an option on a large and growing manufacturing market at pre-revenue prices, backed by the Taiwanese state and locked to the American side by February's agreement. The option pays off only if TBMC holds its schedule, which is not a sure thing. But that is the shape of the trade now on offer, and it is on offer precisely because almost no one has built the machinery to price it. The depressed share prices and the thin deal flow are the same fact seen twice: good assets that no one has built a bridge to reach.
A trade that runs both ways
So I am carrying two things to Taipei. The first is an American reading of what it takes to develop and sell a drug in the United States, the market most Taiwanese founders are aiming at. The second is a list of questions: which assets are real, which teams understand the regulatory translation, and where a first deal could actually close.
What I want to bring home is a shorter list of drugs worth developing, and a clearer sense of whether the bio shield is a slogan or a supply chain. I will report back. My bet, going in, is simple. The country Americans file under "chips" is quietly becoming a medicine story, and the people who see it first will have their pick of the assets, at prices that will not last once the bridge is built.
Written in a personal capacity.