When Shenzhen Puri Gold and Gilead Sciences reached a $1.64 billion cooperation agreement, and Hansoh Pharmaceutical signed a $1.53 billion licensing agreement with Swiss Roche, the global pharmaceutical landscape is undergoing profound changes. These blockbuster deals, occurring within just two days, are merely a microcosm of the global rise of China’s biopharmaceutical industry. In today’s era of intertwined globalization and technological revolution, China’s biopharmaceutical industry has completed a historic leap from “imitation and tracking” to “innovation leadership,” becoming a key force in reshaping the global pharmaceutical landscape.
The global biomedical market is undergoing structural changes, with the market size expected to exceed $1.5 trillion by 2025. In this wave, China’s innovative power has emerged as a rising force—its number of new drugs in development accounts for over 20% of the global total, firmly ranking second worldwide. In the first half of 2025, the total value of licensing deals for innovative drugs reached nearly $66 billion, surpassing the entire 2024 total. From the approval of zanubrutinib in European and American markets to the head-to-head clinical trials of anlotinib and evolocumab challenging international star drugs, China’s innovative drugs are winning global recognition with solid clinical data. These achievements mark China’s pharmaceutical innovation transitioning from “quantitative accumulation” to “qualitative leap,” achieving a role shift from “follower” to “key contributor” in the global pharmaceutical value chain.
Behind this transformation lies the comprehensive innovation support system constructed by the Chinese government. Through continuous deepening of the reform of drug evaluation and approval systems, the 2025 version of the “Measures for the Administration of Drug Registration” has reduced the average review period for innovative drugs to 45 days, cutting the shortest time from application to market launch for domestically developed innovative drugs to 7 months, significantly enhancing R&D efficiency. On the payment side, the National Medical Security Administration established a separate negotiation channel for “innovative drugs” and set an upper limit for renewal discounts, stabilizing corporate expectations. Meanwhile, the “dual catalog” mechanism, through the synergy of basic medical insurance and commercial health insurance, has built a multi-level medical security system. In terms of industrial ecology, policies such as the “China (Jiangsu) Pilot Free Trade Zone Biomedical Industry Full-Chain Open Innovation and Development Plan” approved by the State Council have promoted integrated innovation across the entire industrial chain from R&D to production. These precise policy combinations have provided a uniquely favorable development environment for China’s biomedical innovation.
Technological innovation is the core driving force behind the global rise of China’s biopharmaceutical industry. The deep application of disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and computational medicine is reshaping the paradigm of drug development. The digital twin technology developed by the Western Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences can compress the drug development cycle by 90%; the artificial intelligence-based nano-delivery platform of Jiate Technology has successfully overcome the industry challenges in ex vivo delivery. These technological breakthroughs not only enhance R&D efficiency but also enable Chinese enterprises to gain a competitive edge in emerging fields such as nanocarriers and antibody-drug conjugates. Meanwhile, Chinese pharmaceutical companies continue to increase their R&D investments. Taking China Biopharmaceutical as an example, its annual R&D expenditure has exceeded 4 billion yuan, and it has independently established a technology platform covering cutting-edge fields such as bispecific antibodies, small interfering RNA, and gene therapy, accumulating energy for the development of globally first-in-class drugs.
At the global cooperation level, the China market has become an indispensable strategic hub for multinational pharmaceutical companies. Roche Group has established a new production base in China worth 2.04 billion yuan, while Intime Medical has set Shanghai as its largest R&D and production center in the Asia-Pacific region. These investment decisions highlight China’s pivotal role in the global supply chain. More notably, the cooperation model is shifting from mere technology transfer to deeper collaboration—Innovent Biologics and Takeda Pharmaceutical’s $11.4 billion partnership, adopting a “joint development + joint commercialization” model with an initial payment of $1.2 billion, marks a substantial enhancement of Chinese pharmaceutical companies ‘influence in global governance. This transition from “technology export” to “ecosystem co-construction” stands as the best testament to China’s global competitiveness in biopharmaceuticals.
The regional cluster effect has further amplified the global influence of China’s biopharmaceutical industry. The Yangtze River Delta region accounts for 38% of the nation’s clinical trial resources, while the Pearl River Delta region contributes 45% of the overseas licensing revenue. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region has established distinctive advantages in cutting-edge fields such as gene editing. These industrial clusters have built an internationally competitive biopharmaceutical innovation ecosystem through industrial chain collaboration and the integration of innovative resources. Meanwhile, the resilience and quality system of China’s manufacturing sector are becoming stabilizers in the global supply chain, with domestic CMO companies’ orders booked through 2027 and capacity utilization rates exceeding 90%.
Looking ahead, with the conclusion of the 14th Five-Year Plan and the launch of the 15th Five-Year Plan, China’s biomedical industry faces new development opportunities. In frontier fields such as ADC drugs, cell and gene therapies, and AI-driven pharmaceuticals, China is expected to produce more “world-first innovative drugs.” Through the construction of the Belt and Road innovation drug trading platform and the establishment of international standards, China will deeply participate in global health governance. Leveraging a continuously optimized policy environment and rapidly converging innovative elements, China is poised to play an even more critical role in the global biomedical landscape.
From laboratory breakthroughs to global market recognition, the rise of China’s biomedical industry is a development path led by policies, driven by innovation, and characterized by open cooperation. In the global wave of pharmaceutical innovation, China has not only contributed innovative drugs to the world but also offered an open and collaborative “China solution”. As the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation deepens, China’s biomedical industry will continue to take innovation as its engine, injecting strong momentum into building a global community of health for all.