US drugmakers are licensing molecules from China for potential new medicines at an accelerating pace, according to new data, betting they can turn upfront payments of as little as $80 million into multibillion-dollar treatments.
That increased pace is expected to continue as US drugmakers look to rebuild pipelines of future products to replace $200 billion worth of medicines that will lose patent protection by the end of the decade, analysts, investors, a banker and a drug company executive told Reuters.
“They are finding very high-quality assets coming out of China and at prices that are much more affordable relative to perhaps the equivalent type of product that they might find in the United States,” said Mizuho analyst Graig Suvannavejh.
China’s share of global drug development is now nearly 30%, while the US share of the world’s research and development has slipped 1% to about 48%, according to pharmaceutical data provider Citeline’s report in March.
Roughly a third of the assets that large pharmaceutical companies licensed in 2024 were from China, said Brian Gleason, head of biotech investment banking at Raymond James, who estimated such licensing deals would increase to between 40% and 50%.
This article suggests to me that China pharma technology is equal if not ahead of US pharma.