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China’s Rise in Drug Development Looms Over U.S.. (NY Times)
Clinical trials in China are getting attention at an international oncology gathering in Chicago. China’s surging biotechnology industry is fueling alarm that U.S. dominance in the field is waning.
Excerpts:
The clearest sign: In what appears to be a first, one of the conference’s five coveted headliners will be a presentation of a clinical trial conducted only in China.
“This tells us that the Chinese biotech industry has arrived,” said Dr. Otis Brawley, a professor at Johns Hopkins who has attended the ASCO meeting every year since 1989.
With Chinese companies churning out patents, papers in medical journals and new clinical trials, U.S. biotech start-ups say they are struggling to keep up and are facing deep disadvantages.
“I think the concerns are valid and very real,” said Dr. Robert Califf, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. “The U.S. is being seriously threatened.”
In the last few years, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have been filling their pipelines by turning to China, where prices are low, regulatory hurdles are fewer, and development timelines are quick.
So far this year, about half of such major deals involved a drug from China, up from next to nothing in the 2010s, according to DealForma, which tracks drug industry transactions.
Critics of China also point to an increasingly worrisome pattern. Chinese drug developers race to essentially copy U.S. inventions. As protection, some U.S. biotech start-ups have imposed new measures to maintain secrecy, like refusing to publish papers or present posters at conferences.
As Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. health secretary, put it to lawmakers at a hearing in April: “China is eating our lunch.”
In March, Chris Klomp, one of Mr. Kennedy’s top lieutenants, described the current climate to those attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It’s not one of missiles and tanks,” he said. “It’s of laboratories and lifesaving medications. It’s a war right now with China on American innovation and biotechnology.”
For now, big multinational pharmaceutical companies are developing most drugs invented in China for introduction to the U.S. market. But some fear that if more Chinese companies assume a direct role, American patients could become dangerously reliant on the Chinese government for access to vital brand-name drugs.
There is a risk, Dr. Marks said, of “creating a new Strait of Hormuz.”
ASCO’s chief executive, Dr. Clifford Hudis, said this was the first time the group could recall one of those spots going to a study that enrolled patients only in China. The closest precedent was in 2021, when one headliner involved a trial of an immunotherapy drug that was conducted mostly in China, with a few sites in Taiwan and Singapore.
But this year’s unusual selection has been generating buzz in medical circles for weeks. Christoph Westphal, a biotech venture capital investor, called the top billing at the conference “a coming-of-age moment for China.”
China is quietly taking control of US medicine. We must stop helping it.
Third, we need to reinvest in domestic infrastructure that made American biomedical innovation the gold standard — supporting clinical trial capacity at home, and streamlining, but not weakening, regulatory pathways.
Telling that this came third, when it should probably be first. China isn’t doing anything exceptionally shady here, just like any superpower, they’re trying to dominate a field previously dominated by another superpower.
“When an enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt them”.
I agree. Just because the US has decided scientific research is no longer an admirable goal and has cut funding doesn’t mean that China should do the same. I applaud China for progressing science. I wish the US would do the same!