Shine was excited about going to BIOHK2026 after her university offered her a free ticket. She was beginning to study drug regulatory affairs and policy, and here was a chance to see some of the people, companies, and ideas behind those subjects gathered in one place. When she came back from her Friday afternoon visit, though, she had a question that was harder to answer than she had expected: Hong Kong could bring everyone together, but how much of the work was actually happening here?

She had spent about two hours looking around an exhibition that felt smaller and quieter than she had imagined. By the third day, some booths had little more than a banner, a few leaflets, and an empty chair, even though the exhibitor board showed a long list of companies and organisations. It was quite possible to look at that list and see a busy international industry, then walk around the hall and come away with a less settled impression.

Five days later, Hong Kong published its first Five-Year Plan, which gave us something else to put beside her experience. The government was setting out how it wanted the city’s medical innovation sector to grow, while Shine had just seen a small part of what was there already. I thought the gap between those two views was worth staying with, especially before deciding what either of them meant.

What was happening in the hall?

Shine described a mix of universities, biotechnology companies, research service providers, regional pavilions, and organisations promoting particular cities or industrial parks. Some booths offered a product or a service, while others explained why a business might want to move to their part of the world. There was plenty to look at, although it was not always the kind of biotechnology exhibition she had pictured.

That mix matters when we try to understand the size of an event. A university lab, a company developing a medicine, and an office looking for investors can all have a booth, but they tell us different things about the industry around them. A long exhibitor list shows that many people have a reason to be there; it takes a closer look to understand what they are building and where they do their work.

Several contract research organisations, usually called CROs, caught Shine’s attention because they advertised artificial intelligence as part of their services. Her comment was that an AI-driven CRO was still a CRO, which seemed a fair reminder to ask what lay behind the label. Adding AI to a description does not, by itself, tell us what a company can do well.

I would still want to give those services a fair hearing, because helping another company develop a medicine can involve difficult and valuable work. The questions I would ask are what the team actually handles, how much of that work happens locally, and whether people there get to build experience and take on responsibility. A company does not have to own the final product for its work to matter.

The booths promoting cities and industrial parks needed a similar kind of attention. They helped explain why parts of the exhibition felt like a place to attract investment as much as a place to show new science. Shine remained unsure about some of the pitches, although the rose cake offered at one booth made a much clearer impression.

Of course, two hours on the last day could only tell us so much. We did not know how busy the empty booths had been earlier, which conversations were taking place outside the hall, or what might come from them later. Her visit gave us useful questions to follow, but I would hesitate to turn it into a judgement on the whole industry.

Why the regulatory work matters

One talk stayed with Shine because it connected the event to what she was studying. She recalled a speaker from Oxford discussing the United Kingdom’s proposed Rare Disease Therapies Regulatory Framework, and we later looked at the published proposal to understand it more clearly.

The UK medicines regulator proposes a route called an Investigational Marketing Authorisation, which would allow clinical investigation and carefully controlled patient access while more evidence is collected. It also puts weight on talking with developers earlier and making use of existing knowledge and real-world evidence. The full authorisation route would need changes to the law, so there is still a difference between what has been proposed and what developers can already use.

The UK presents this as part of its ambition to lead in rare-disease treatment development. To me, it also shows why governments care about being involved early: helping a team work through difficult questions about evidence may give a place an important role in how a treatment develops. That role has to be earned through advice and decisions people can trust.

This was what I took from Shine’s observation that everyone wanted a share of early development. A place becomes useful when a team can come there with a difficult problem and find people who can help it move forward responsibly. It takes experienced reviewers, researchers, and other specialists to make that happen, which brought me back to the question of what work the companies at BIOHK were actually doing.

Where the new plan takes us

Hong Kong’s first Five-Year Plan covers 2026–2030 and sets out plans for a Centre for Medical Products Regulation, full primary evaluation of new drugs by 2030, and a legal regulatory system for medical devices to replace the voluntary arrangements. Primary evaluation means building the ability to assess drug applications independently, without depending on another regulator’s approval.

The plan also calls for better clinical-trial facilities and services, professional training, greater use of real-world data to support mainland drug applications, and closer work with Shenzhen. This includes efforts to make ethics reviews work more smoothly across the region. Some of these ideas were already in the government’s earlier plans, including the drug-evaluation roadmap announced in June 2025, so they have not all appeared for the first time this week.

Even so, the plan gives us a reason to look beyond the scene Shine found in the exhibition hall. Hong Kong intends to keep expanding its medical innovation and regulatory work, and it would be unfair to assume that what she saw this month is all there will ever be. We simply do not yet have enough evidence to feel confident about how much of that ambition will become everyday practice.

For me, confidence would grow through fairly ordinary signs of progress. A team should be able to get clear advice, understand what evidence it needs, and work with different institutions without spending all its time sorting out the gaps between them. Companies coming back after a useful first experience would tell us something, as would new staff getting proper guidance and gradually taking on more demanding work.

Those things may be less striking than a major announcement, but they would make it easier to believe that something lasting was being built.

What does Hong Kong get from the connection?

When we talked about Hong Kong as a gateway to the Greater Bay Area, Shine turned the usual question around. Alongside asking what Hong Kong could offer its neighbours, she wanted to know what Hong Kong needed from them for its own plans to work.

I think that is worth asking, especially when the new plan gives cooperation with Shenzhen and the wider region such a clear place. I would want to know how the work will be shared, where the research will happen, who will make the important decisions, and where people will gain experience. A project involving several places could benefit all of them, although we would need to look at the details to see how.

We had wondered whether the Greater Bay Area needed Hong Kong as much as Hong Kong needed the Greater Bay Area, but I would leave that as a question for now. The answer may look different to a researcher looking for partners, a company planning a trial, or a manufacturer trying to reach another market. In each case, it seems more useful to ask what involving Hong Kong would help them do.

There is no reason every part of the work has to happen in one city. What I would hope to see is that Hong Kong’s part gives people reasons to keep working here: teams that stay together, partnerships that continue, and jobs in which experience leads to greater responsibility. That would tell us more about the value of the connection than the number of people passing through an exhibition.

How much confidence is enough for now?

For Shine, all of this comes back to a fairly personal question about where her studies might lead. Seeing companies and universities in the same room can make a future career feel closer, even when it is still difficult to see how a student gets from attending an event to doing useful work herself.

I do not think she has to decide whether the whole plan will succeed before she can make her next move. She can be interested in what is being built while continuing to ask what is available now, what she can learn from it, and which opportunities deserve her time. There is room to be hopeful without feeling obliged to be certain, particularly when she is being asked to make personal choices around changes that will take years.

BIOHK showed us a little of what Hong Kong can bring together, while the Five-Year Plan tells us where the government wants to take it. We have reason to expect further efforts to expand, although we still need to see how those efforts turn into research, reliable decisions, and careers that last. I would be glad to find more reasons for confidence as that work develops, and I think Shine would too.

After all, an afternoon spent walking, listening, and trying to make sense of it all is tiring, and I was glad that Shine had at least found a good rose stuffed cake along the way. She said there were quite a few booths selling the regional specialities, and she found the exhibition not fully wasted away.

—Frea