Foreign Media: Can China's Pharmaceutical Transactions Pose a Threat to U.S. Biotechnology?
The trade war initiated by President Trump during his first term has long gone beyond the scope of Sino-U.S. bilateral trade. It is clear that the United States is trying to limit China's development in areas where it has achieved promising results, such as semiconductor technology, artificial intelligence, and other industries.
China seems to have also succeeded in the biotechnology field, which cannot help but worry the United States. According to the information portal Axios, the sharp increase in the number of drug licensing transactions with China sends a new signal, indicating that the United States may lose its global leadership in the biotechnology field.
Axios points out that thanks to its strategy for developing the biopharmaceutical industry, China can now supply medicines faster and more cheaply. This is the latest sign of the shift in global power. China has become a major power in fields such as artificial intelligence, chemistry, and others.
According to Evaluate Pharma, heart disease drugs and other drugs from China accounted for nearly 40% of all licensing transactions this year, while the proportion was less than 3% five years ago. Earlier this year, as transactions in areas including cancer treatment surged, the stock prices of Chinese biotechnology companies soared.
An analysis published last week in the journal Nature found that over the past five years, 11 large pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, and GSK, spent over $15 billion to obtain licenses for new drugs containing Chinese ingredients.
As Axios pointed out, China's explosive growth in biotechnology coincides with the U.S. government's cuts in federal biomedical research funding and the freeze on grants to universities and medical research institutions.
The Trump administration has cut the budget of the National Institutes of Health by 40%, and halted $500 million in mRNA vaccine research funding. The different trends in the biotechnology industries of China and the United States may make China the leader in this field. Axios concluded, pharmaceutical companies will face a wave of patent expirations in the next five years, and they may increasingly look to the East for new medicines and their production ingredients.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1842705653094407/
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