China's biotech boom leaves U.S. playing catch-up

China is now setting the pace in life sciences R&D, conducting more clinical trials than the U.S. and licensing new discoveries to American companies. The big picture: China has become a linchpin in global drug development, the result of a decade-long national strategy to develop a biopharmaceutical industry. Where it stands: China has surpassed the U.S. in drug clinical trials, per a report from GlobalData, marking a turning point in the global race to dominate the life sciences.An independent, bipartisan commission told Congress last month that China is beating the U.S. in advanced biotech and that policymakers need to pour significant resources into the sector over the next five years to keep up. Some experts say the Trump administration's cuts to National Institutes of Health and university-based biomedical research risk putting the U.S. further behind when it should be supporting work on drugs targeting cancer and other conditions and outbreaks like the avian flu."China is not the [biotech] superpower that has overtaken the U.S., but we certainly have to be very careful that they don't become the superpower," said entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding, who's been tracking Chinese influence in the industry for nearly a decade. By the numbers: In 2024, China listed more than 7,100 clinical trials in the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. The U.S. listed about 6,000 trials. Beijing and Shanghai had more laboratory and R&D space under construction at the end of 2024 than any other global markets, with Boston in a distant third place, according to an April report from CBRE. Pharmaceutical and medical technology patents also increased 379% in China over the past decade, the CBRE report said. Between the lines: Cheaper labor and less regulation have shifted drug discovery from the U.S. to China. The investment bank Stifel projects 37% of big pharmaceutical companies' licensed molecules will come from China this year.Chinese biotechs have gone from mostly replicating U.S. discoveries with copycat products to creating new treatments that could potentially dominate categories like cancer therapies and autoimmune diseases.That's led to more licensing agreements for experimental Chinese drugs and significant new investments from companies like Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi and Novartis. What they're saying: "When U.S. drugmakers license compounds from China, they divert funds that might otherwise bolster innovation hubs such as Boston's Kendall Square or North Carolina's Research Triangle," Scott Gottlieb, President Trump's first-term Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote in an op-ed in Stat this month. "The U.S. biotechnology industry was the world's envy, but if we're not careful, every drug could be made in China."A defining moment came last fall, when Summit Therapeutics announced that a cancer immunotherapy it licensed from a Chinese biotech firm outperformed Merck's blockbuster Keytruda in patients with advanced lung cancer. Some likened the development to the breakthroughs from Chinese AI startup DeepSeek that rocked Silicon Valley.Scholars at the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in a March commentary that it wasn't a one-off event, noting there are increasing numbers of new drugs in development, accompanied by a surge in clinical trials.Reality check: Gottlieb said the trend will accelerate unless the U.S. takes steps to make U.S.-based drug development easier.He advocates using AI and other tools to tap existing data on drugs' performance to ease the cumbersome requirements of early clinical studies — something the FDA is just starting to address. Roeding, the biotech entrepreneur, said improving the speed of clinical trials and ensuring stable funding for startups are necessary to keep the U.S. at the forefront of innovation. What we're watching: Whether the tariffs and trade wars lead China to double down on biotech and other industries heavy in IP, to lessen the U.S. threat to their economy."The trends that are already underway — higher innovation from Chinese biotech, a booming market in Hong Kong and the like would very likely accelerate," Stifel analyst Tim Opler wrote in a recent note.

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