China’s biotech is redrawing the global pharma map; what India can learn

China though it has not got the sensational public attention the AI model received. China’s biotech research is redrawing the global map. The axis of innovation is tilting from the West to Beijing. Scores of small biotech startups, which have sprung up across China over the last decade, are coming up with medical breakthroughs. Impressed by the speed of drug research and new treatment modalities, global pharmaceutical companies are throwing princely sums to buy leads, which have the potential to be drugs.

There is a big lesson or two here for India, which has been prioritising generics over innovation.

The quiet change in China is stark. Barely two decades ago, it was looked down as a big factory for low-cost production of chemicals and raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry. Now savvy and young scientists, trained in the US and Europe, are regrouping in their home turf. Popularly referred to as sea turtles (which return from the sea to the beach to lay eggs), they come back with their knowledge of science and business. This disruption has become an existential risk for the centuries-old, entrenched American and European pharmaceutical industries.

Live Events

Stifel, an investment banking firm in US, asks in its January report: “Is Chinese-sourced innovation an existential threat to western biotech?” It says nearly a third of the molecules (medicines or therapies that are in experimental stages or research) sourced by Big Pharma (leading US and European companies) through licensing deals are coming from