Cuba has the West Havana Scientific Pole, India the GenomeValley, and South Korea built DaedukScienceTown.

A first-of-its-kind study published Monday in Nature Biotechnology, a British journal, reports that as biotech centers in North America and Europe have flourished in recent years, similar hubs in the developing world have been quietly mushrooming as well.

The study, which took 15 researchers three years to complete, uses Cuba as an example of consistently turning necessity into opportunity. With severe economic problems stemming from the Soviet Union’s disintegration and the United States’ 43-year trade embargo, Cuba has been forced to develop home-grown treatments, including the first vaccine for meningitis B and recently the world’s first-ever vaccine with a synthetic antigen.

“Cuba’s export of biotech products is a significant industry, rivaling sugar export and tourism – and it’s growing,” said Peter Singer, one of the study’s authors and Director of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics. Cuba currently exports biotech products to more than 50 countries.

But the study found that one country in particular is poised to make a big splash in biotech: China. In addition to a comparatively liberal legal environment, and existing human stem cell banks in Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan, Guangdong, and Zheiiang, China already is noted for its ability to rapidly reach world standards in biotech’s subfields. The country showcased this to the world as the only developing country to participate in the Human Genome Project. Today, China has its sights set on therapeutic antibodies, gene therapy, functional genomics, and stem cells. Notably, the Chinese firm SiBono GenTech, based in the special economic zone near the Hong Kong border, was the first Chinese company to obtain a drug license for a gene therapy.

It was ethics, not biotech, that sparked the idea for the study. Mr. Singer describes inequities in health care as “the mother of all ethical challenges,” and looked at the biotech industry as one of the chief elements underlying the disparity.

Companies like Shantha Biotechnics are making strides toward closing the gap. Located in Hyderabad, India, the firm has developed a recombinant vaccine for hepatitis B, and in doing so has lessened reliance on foreign imports, cutting the price per dose from around $16 to $0.50. The company was also able to sell its hepatitis B vaccine to UNICEF more cheaply than competitors in the developed world.

Such success stories are changing the image of intellectual property law in the developing world. “As opposed to a few years ago, when IP was seen as something to fight, countries are beginning to innovate. [Now] they want their own products to have value,” said Abdallah Daar, director of ethics and policy at the McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine in Toronto. “Until now, India had weak IP and the focus was on process patenting, not product patenting.”

According to Mr. Singer, the development of biotech industries outside the developed world is essential for the creation of drugs and therapies for the world’s poor. Only 16 of the 1,393 new drugs marketed between 1975 and 1999 were for diseases predominantly affecting developing countries – and 3 of these were for tuberculosis, which has an impact in rich countries, too. In the same period, more than 175 new drugs were developed for cardiovascular disease.

The report is also critical of barriers to industry growth in the countries studied. Communication between researchers and the private sector is often poor, particularly in academically powerful Brazil; patent-protection systems are often inefficient and the instability attached to a lack of continuity in funding is discouraging VCs.

Efforts are being made to overcome these problems, however, and Mr. Daah said that a few U.S. VCs are starting to invest and many more are studying the opportunities seriously.

Mr. Singer said a cultural shift happened during the years when he was researching the report. He recalled a conversation with a Brazilian scientist. “I remember him saying ‘[your] diseases of poverty are for me a market opportunity.’”