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It’s not just AI. China’s medicines are surprising the world, too
Its firms are at the forefront of cheaper, faster drug discovery
Keytruda, a cancer medicine, ranks among the most lucrative drugs ever sold. Since its launch in 2014 it has raked in more than $130bn in sales for Merck, its American maker, including $29.5bn last year. In September last year an experimental drug did what none had done before. In late-stage trials for non-small cell lung cancer, it nearly doubled the time patients lived without the disease getting worse—to 11.1 months, compared with 5.8 months for Keytruda.
The results were stunning. So too was the nationality of the biotech company behind them. Akeso is Chinese.
In recent months China’s progress in artificial intelligence has stunned the world. A quieter yet equally significant shift is under way in biotech. China has long been known for churning out generic drugs, supplying raw ingredients and managing clinical trials for the pharmaceutical world. But its drugmakers are now also at the cutting edge, producing innovative medicines that are cheaper than the ones they compete with. China has become the second-largest developer of new drugs, behind only America (see chart 1).
As a consequence, Western drugmakers are increasingly looking east for ideas. Because of expiring drug patents, they stand to lose as much as $140bn a year in sales by 2030. Last year nearly a third of the large licensing deals they struck—those worth $50m or more—were with Chinese firms, triple the share of 2020. lek, a consultancy, estimates that during that time, the total value of drugs licensed worldwide from China rose 15-fold, to $48bn (see chart 2). In November Merck paid $588m to LaNova Medicines, another Chinese biotech firm, to secure rights to a therapy similar to that produced by Akeso.
