Miguel Afonso Caetano on Nostr: "China’s biotech boom mirrors its rise in tech. In both cases, China has moved up ...

"China’s biotech boom mirrors its rise in tech. In both cases, China has moved up the value chain, from manufacturing goods to becoming a more sophisticated hub for innovation, competing in industries once dominated by the U.S. There are several reasons for the industry’s growth. For one, many top scientists trained in the U.S. have returned to China over the past decade, fueling the emergence of biotech hubs around Shanghai. And just as DeepSeek built a formidable chatbot—allegedly on a lean budget with limited access to semiconductors—Chinese biotech companies are also scrappier, capitalizing on a highly skilled, lower-cost workforce that can move faster.

Additionally, companies can conduct clinical trials at a fraction of what they would cost in the U.S., while recent changes in the Chinese regulatory system have streamlined and accelerated the approval process to get a study started.

For now, much of China’s biotech innovation is incremental rather than groundbreaking. Many companies focus on improving existing drugs—tweaking the chemistry, enhancing efficacy or differentiating them in key ways.

But Chinese innovation is steadily improving and is already starting to disrupt the U.S. drug-development ecosystem. For decades, the U.S. biotech industry has thrived in hubs such as Boston-Cambridge and the San Francisco Bay Area, fueled by talent streaming from top academic centers like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Those biotech companies have an insatiable client in Big Pharma, which is willing to pay top dollar for new drugs to replace those going off-patent."

https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/the-drug-industry-is-having-its-own-deepseek-moment-68589d70

#China #BioTech #DrugIndustry #Pharma