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Japan Times
17 hours ago
- Business
- Japan Times
China biotech's stunning advance is changing the world's drug pipeline
The biotechnology industry is experiencing a tectonic shift, driven by Chinese drugmakers who have come a long way from their copycat days to challenge Western dominance on innovation. The number of novel drugs in China — for cancer, weight-loss and more — entering into development ballooned to over 1,250 last year, far surpassing the European Union and nearly catching up to the U.S.'s count of about 1,440, an exclusive Bloomberg News analysis showed. And the drug candidates from the land once notorious for cheap knock-offs and quality issues are increasingly clearing high bars to win recognition from both drug regulators and Western pharmaceutical giants. The findings, gleaned from an analysis of a database maintained by pharma intelligence solutions provider Norstella, show a fundamental shift in medical innovation's center of gravity. With U.S. President Donald Trump already threatening tariffs on the pharmaceutical sector, China's biotech advances — the scale of which is slowly coming into view — risk becoming another realm of superpower rivalry like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. "The scale itself is not something we've seen before,' said Helen Chen, managing partner at LEK Consulting in Shanghai, who has advised healthcare companies on their China strategy since 2003. "The products are here, they're attractive and they're fast.' This shift has occurred at an unprecedented pace. When China began to overhaul its drug regulatory system in 2015, the country had just 160 compounds to contribute to the global pipeline of innovative drugs, or less than 6% of the total, behind Japan and the U.K. The reforms helped streamline reviews, enforced data quality standards and improved transparency. The government's "Made in China 2025" plan to elevate manufacturing in 10 priority sectors also helped spur a flurry of investments in biotechnology. Altogether, they unleashed a boom led by foreign-educated and -trained scientists and entrepreneurs. "Not only is it now almost at parity with the U.S. but it has that growth trajectory,' said Daniel Chancellor, vice president of thought leadership at Norstella. "It wouldn't be sensationalist to suggest that China will overtake the U.S. in the next few years purely in terms of numbers of drugs that it's bringing through into its pipeline.' Bloomberg News' data analysis focuses on innovative drugs, excluding generic combinations, reformulations and biosimilars. Numbers aside, the more stunning leap is in the quality of Chinese biotech innovation. While there's constant debate in the pharmaceutical industry on whether Chinese firms are capable of producing not just effective but needle-shifting new therapies, there's growing recognition on multiple fronts. The world's strictest regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency, increasingly view Chinese drugs as generally promising enough to justify devoting extra resources to speed up their review, handing them coveted industry designations such as priority review, breakthrough therapy designation or fast track status. The country is now slightly ahead of the EU in earning such expedited reviews as of 2024, the data shows, a remarkable edge over a region that previously produced drugs like Wegovy. One of the early exemplars of Chinese innovation is a cell therapy that has shown promise to potentially cure a deadly blood cancer. First developed in China by Legend Biotech, it is now marketed by Johnson & Johnson — having won a few expedited review designations along the way — and considered superior to a competing U.S.-originated therapy. Still, the absolute number of China-originated drugs winning these designations trails their U.S. counterparts by a large margin. Risk aversion remains a factor holding back Chinese pharmaceutical innovation: So far, top companies tend to focus on making better versions of existing therapies or new iterations of older ideas, and few are pioneering novel treatment approaches that have never been tried before — an endeavor that comes with a high risk of failure and is still led by the U.S., Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan. Nevertheless, the biggest Chinese breakthroughs are increasingly being snapped up by pharmaceutical giants for record sums, a sign that the perennial competition for the next blockbuster drug is also shifting East. A novel cancer drug from Akeso, which came out more effective than Merck & Co.'s Keytruda in a Chinese study last year, has been likened to China biotech's DeepSeek moment, spawning a new wave of global interest. The promise of topping Keytruda, the world's top-selling drug, also swelled the valuation of Summit Therapeutics, which in 2022 paid $500 million upfront for the development and marketing rights in the U.S. and other regions. Other multinational players like Merck, AstraZeneca and Roche Holding have also scooped up Chinese assets. In May, Pfizer set a new record as it announced a $1.2 billion upfront deal with 3SBio for a cancer drug similar to Akeso's. These deals are increasing in both value and frequency, according to biopharma deal database DealForma, signaling confidence that China-originated drugs are competitive internationally and can bring in substantial revenue. The volume of potential candidates coming out of China means multinational companies, which have a constant need to add new products to the mix, can "cast their net wider than ever before,' Norstella's Chancellor said. A key advantage that has fueled the rise of Chinese biotech firms is their ability to conduct research cheaper and faster at every step of the way, from lab experiments and animal testing to human trials. Technicians work inside a production laboratory for CAR-T cell therapies at an IASO Biotechnology facility in Nanjing on June 9. | Bloomberg Creating a new drug from scratch is notoriously time-consuming and expensive, and China's massive patient pool and centralized hospital network have become a significant accelerator. An analysis of the time taken for drugs to conduct various testing stages shows that doctors in China can recruit for trials much faster — for early trials for cancer and obesity drugs, they can complete patient enrollment in half the time compared to the U.S. The difference in costs means Chinese companies can afford to run multiple trials simultaneously to find a winner, or quickly launch new projects once a scientific idea is validated by other groups. Since 2021, China has become the top location for clinical research, initiating the largest number of new trials globally, according to GlobalData. "They can leapfrog competitors in other countries,' said Andy Liu, head of China at Novotech Health Holdings, which helps companies run clinical trials. To be sure, clinical data in China is just a start. U.S. regulators have made it clear that China-only trial results, no matter how positive, are not sufficient to support drug approvals. Chinese biotechs with ambition to sell their drugs overseas must prove that their treatment benefits can be replicated in non-Chinese patients, through complex and slower-moving global studies. It may still be a few years before a critical mass of drugs sourced from China wins U.S. and EU approvals — the gold standard for high-quality treatments — and becomes widely used in the Western world, but many in the industry believe that's inevitable. China's innovators comprise both cutting-edge biotech startups founded by foreign-educated entrepreneurs, and old-guard Chinese pharmaceutical companies like Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, which used to be one of the country's biggest generic drugmakers. The company poured billions of dollars into shifting to innovative research and development after Beijing's campaign to lower generic drug prices made that sector less profitable. It's now the world's top-ranked pharmaceutical company for the number of new innovative drugs added to the research pipeline in the period of 2020-2024. Of the 50 companies that generated the highest number of innovative drug candidates between 2020 and 2024, 20 of them were Chinese, compared to five in the five years before. "As we move forward, the fact that there's high quality innovation in China in terms of biotech will no longer be a novelty,' said Ali Pashazadeh, founder and managing director of healthcare advisory firm Treehill Partners in London. "It'll just be an accepted part of the norm.' At a time when China and the U.S. are engaged in renewed geopolitical spats, the growth of China's biotech ecosystem is causing alarm among some American politicians and business leaders. A congressional commission warned that the U.S. risks losing its leadership position in yet another industry critical to national security. "Biotech is one of the forefronts of the U.S.-China tech rivalry,' said Jack Burnham, research analyst at the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In addition to economic implications and possible military applications of biotech, China's leverage on innovative therapies may be weaponized in a future conflict, he said, if Americans become dependent on those medicines. The perception of threat has spurred calls for the U.S. government to stymie China's biotech growth — through restrictions such as export controls on scientific equipment and barriers to investment — and boost the domestic biotech sector, including by changing the regulatory environment to emulate countries where clinical trials are run more quickly. Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, recently pledged to "Make American Biotech Accelerate.' Despite the risks of the newly combative relationship between the world's two biggest economies, Chinese drugmakers like Akeso have set their sights on bringing their therapies to developed Western markets. "The pharma industry is the best industry in the world,' Akeso CEO Michelle Xia said in an April interview. "At the end of the day, what we do benefits patients in China, in the U.S. and all around the world.'
Arabian Business
03-06-2025
- Business
- Arabian Business
Dubai student boom as 29% surge in international enrolment signals new global education hotspot
With new universities, a major rise in foreign students, and world-class infrastructure, Dubai is rewriting the rules on global higher education. Dubai is making bold moves on the world stage — not just in finance or real estate, but now as a rising education superpower. Latest data from Dubai's Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) reveals a 29 per cent spike in international student enrolment, with more than 42,000 students now studying across 41 licensed institutions. Four new international campuses opened this year alone. Dubai student growth These insights were highlighted during a briefing, hosted by L.E.K. Consulting 's Global Education Practice in Dubai, which convened senior stakeholders, policymakers, and higher education leaders to discuss Dubai's accelerating transformation into a world-class higher education destination. The event featured key perspectives from the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA). According to L.E.K. Consulting's research and analysis, Dubai presents 'one of the most compelling growth markets globally for higher education,' driven by key factors, including a growing high school student base, increasing demand for transnational education, the presence of globally recognised university brands, student-friendly infrastructure, and strong post-study employment pathways. Latest figures from the KHDA highlight this strong growth momentum across the sector. More than 42,000 students are now enrolled across 41 private higher education institutions in the emirate that are licensed and regulated by the KHDA, with an increase of around 20 per cent increase in overall student enrolment in the 2024-25 academic year. International student enrolment has surged by 29 per cent compared to the previous year, now representing 35 per cent of total enrolments in the city's higher education institutions, which are licensed by the KHDA. Meanwhile, Emirati participation in international universities has also grown by 22 per cent, underscoring Dubai's dual appeal to both domestic and global learners. Four new international institutions opened in the current academic year alone. The strong growth supports KHDA's Education 33 strategy, and specifically its City of Students initiative, which aims to raise international student enrolment to 50 per cent by 2033, transforming the emirate into a world-leading destination for quality higher education. Dr. Wafi Dawood, CEO of the Strategic Development Sector at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, said: 'Dubai's continued growth as a global hub for higher education is testament to our leadership's vision and the ambitious goals of the Dubai Plan 33 and its social and economic agendas and driven by our Education 33 strategy. 'We are creating new opportunities for transnational education, strengthening Dubai's position as a city where learners, educators, and institutions from around the world can connect, collaborate, and thrive. 'Through E33, we are building a future where Dubai is not only a destination for quality education, but a centre of knowledge, innovation, and opportunity.' As the demand for transnational education, upskilling, and reskilling intensifies, the emirate's blend of strategic policy, global connectivity, and education quality continues to position it as a top-tier alternative to traditional study destinations. Ashwin Assomull, Partner and Head of the Global Education Practice at L.E.K. Consulting, said: 'With a growing pool of graduates from our wonderful array of international schools in the city, Dubai presents a significant opportunity for international universities to meet the evolving needs of both local and international students. 'Amid increasing regulatory restrictions in traditional anglophone markets, Dubai's world-class higher education infrastructure, global connectivity, favourable cost structure, and reputation for safety present unparalleled opportunities for students, operators, and investors to capitalise on this transformative growth.' Key stats behind Dubai's higher education boom
The Independent
26-05-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Let drug companies see NHS patient data to save lives, former cabinet minister urges
A former cabinet minister has called for drug companies to get easier access to NHS data. Greg Clark, who was the business secretary under Theresa May, has backed a report that says it would save lives and give the country's finances a multi-billion pound boost. It calls for firms to be able to see anonymised raw details - that would not reveal patients' private information. But the call will prove controversial, amid warnings the data could fall into the wrong hands. Mr Clark said the UK 'cannot hope to compete on the international stage without… the right policies'. The NHS has access to some of the most comprehensive sets of health-related data in the world, with more than 60 million registered patients. Pharmaceutical firms believe its sheer size could allow them to uncover patterns that could potentially open up new types of treatments. Making NHS data easier for commercial researchers to use could add more than more than £10bn a year to the UK economy and create new medicines, according to new research by LEK Consulting, commissioned by science charity SCI, previously known as the Society for Chemical Industry. The SCI's chief executive Sharon Todd admitted the idea would provoke 'controversy' but said it could be 'transformational for the UK economy'. Mr Clark, who is also the chair of the board of trustees at the SCI, said the organisation knew 'first-hand the extent of our country's considerable potential in life sciences… with world-leading academic institutions and a swathe of start-up potential, the UK has all the ingredients it needs to be a global leader in the sector. 'However, we cannot hope to compete on the international stage without first having the right policies in place. Our research highlights meaningful action that policymakers can take to realise the future of UK life sciences.' But Jake Moore, a global cybersecurity advisor at ESET Internet Security, said: 'Sharing your health data with pharmaceutical companies has the power of helping advance medical research but it also carries worrying privacy and security risks for people to be vigilant of. 'Unfortunately, even anonymised data could raise privacy concerns as there's the risk that your information could be used for commercial gain without clear benefit to you, or even shared further without your knowledge. 'Ethical issues around consent, transparency and data security mean it's incredibly important to understand who will access your data, how it will be used and what safeguards are in place before agreeing to share it. All of which is often an afterthought for those whose data it is. But as with encrypted communications, even limited access can be exploited leading to much bigger problems in cybersecurity and privacy.' It is not the first time the idea has been suggested. In 2023 the boss of GlaxoSmithKline called for drug companies to get easier access to NHS patient data. Dame Emma Walmsley called on the then PM Rishi Sunak to 'do more' as she argued that handing over anonymised files on millions of Brits would 'prevent and treat disease more effectively'. Some NHS data can already be shared with other organisations, if it is 'necessary and proportionate', according to NHS England.
