Pharmaceutical companies are buying drug candidates from overseas at record volume, and they are pricing those deals almost entirely on the strength of the science. Resilient Performance Group LLC, the rare disease commercial advisory practice founded by Brian Baldari, Pharm.D., MBA, said the commercial exposure created when an asset developed under one regulatory and payer system must be launched under a different one is going unpriced. The firm calls that exposure the Landing Gap.
The deal volume itself is not in dispute. The value of licensing deals signed by companies in the greater China region rose nearly tenfold between 2021 and 2025, reaching $137.7 billion, according to data provider Pharmcube as reported by Reuters. Analysis published by PitchBook found that nearly three quarters of cross-border licensing agreements involved assets still in preclinical or Phase 1 testing, and concluded that China's edge in generating early-stage candidates is likely to persist. Buyers are acquiring earlier, in larger numbers and from further away than at any point in the industry's history.
"An asset crosses a border in a single transaction. The commercial understanding required to launch it here does not cross with it," Baldari said. He argued that diligence is thorough on the molecule and thin on everything downstream of approval. In his view, nobody is pricing whether the development program supports a US label, whether the value story survives a US payer, or whether origin market pricing holds up in the US channel. That, he said, is the Landing Gap, carried today as an unexamined assumption rather than a line item.
The firm has formalized the work under a named practice, Cross-Border Commercial Readiness. The practice is not new: Resilient Performance Group has performed this work since it began operating in July 2025, and across its first twelve months 58 percent of engagements required commercial perspective spanning more than one geographic market. Every engagement addressed the United States, and a majority also addressed Europe, Japan or China. Over that period the firm completed 26 engagements for 14 clients across ten therapeutic and functional areas, including rare renal disease, complement biology, hematology, cardiovascular and cardiometabolic disease, hepatology, market access and reimbursement, and pipeline prioritization. Engagements supported assets from first-in-human through Phase 3, and repeat business accounted for 46 percent of engagements, concentrated in two long-running client relationships. The work also shifted from discrete scoped projects toward multi-month embedded commercial leadership for organizations that have not yet built a standing commercial function.
The implications reach beyond the advisory firm. Chief commercial officers, founders, chief medical officers, boards and investors evaluating or executing on in-licensed and cross-border assets are the practice's intended audience, covering commercial diligence, US launch strategy, market access and reimbursement frameworks, competitive positioning and investor-facing commercial materials. For a sector paying record sums for early-stage science, the argument is that the cost of adapting a molecule to a new payer and regulatory environment can sit outside the deal price until launch. Baldari said he has sat on both sides of the issue, having carried general manager accountability for delivering a product to US customers and built global strategy for assets originating outside the United States. "Most people have done one or the other," he said. "The reason this gap persists is that pricing it requires someone who has done both, and there are not many of us." Baldari spent 24 years leading pharmaceutical drug launches across medical affairs, market access, US marketing and global strategy, rising to Vice President and Senior General Manager, and has participated in sixteen brand launches. Resilient Performance Group LLC began advisory work in July 2025 and was incorporated in New Jersey on November 4, 2025. More information is available at resilexec.com.
