Pharma Valley, China’s equivalent of Kendall Square, is expanding rapidly

SHANGHAI — Harbour BioMed opened its first office in a Shanghai industrial park in 2016, with a team of eight people. Just two years later, it has become a global biotech company, with offices in Boston and Rotterdam, Netherlands, and more than 150 employees. Here in China, they’re spread among three new labs, and a new office is under construction in walking distance to a cancer hospital. Even so, in Harbour’s original lab, scientists work shoulder to shoulder, sharing limited bench space.

That sort of explosive growth is not all that remarkable here: This is China’s Kendall Square, the epicenter of the country’s biotech industry, where scaffolding sprouts like weeds.

Harbour is only one of that have flocked to a 10-square-kilometer cluster known as “Pharma Valley,” with roughly 30 companies opening in each of the last two years,