Despite trade war, US drug companies turn to China for key cancer treatments

Mint

a day ago

The drug industry has spent months going along with the Trump administration's efforts to move manufacturing and investment into the U.S., and to disentangle the U.S. and Chinese economies. A long list of big pharmaceutical firms have committed tens of billions of dollars to factories and research facilities in the U.S.
In the past few months, though, U.S. pharma companies have simultaneously supercharged their interest in China-based biotechs, announcing what are likely to be the biggest deals ever for the rights to experimental medicines invented by Chinese companies.
So far, the Trump administration has been silent on the deals, which are worth around $25 billion in upfront and potential milestone payments and seem to fly in the face of White House policy.
The deals could one day result in new options for sick patients, but they also pose a major risk to U.S. biotech firms. The domestic drug pipeline relies on capital from Big Pharma, and now those funds may be going to start-ups in Shanghai, rather than Cambridge, Mass.
The recent deals follow a successful trial result last year by U.S. biotech Summit Therapeutics of a new immunotherapy cancer drug it licensed from Chinese firm Akeso. In the trial, the drug outperformed Merck's top-selling Keytruda, raising hopes that it could prove a major advancement in cancer treatment.
Since then, Big Pharma companies have rushed to get their own drugs to compete with Summit's product. There was one deal in November, when Merck licensed an experimental drug from a Chinese drugmaker for around $500 million up front and another $2.7 billion in potential milestone payments.
The biggest deals have come in just the past two weeks. In mid May, Pfizer said it would pay the Chinese biotech 3SBio $1.3 billion up front for its own competitor to the Summit drug, plus billions more in potential milestone payments. Pfizer is also making a $100 million equity investment in 3SBio.
This past week, Bristol Myers Squibb said it would pay $3.5 billion over the next three years, plus billions more in potential milestone payments, for half the rights to a similar drug developed by a Chinese company called Biotheus, which German biotech BioNTech acquired a few months ago.
These numbers would be big for any biotech licensing deal—the drugs remain far from approval. For Chinese-developed drugs, the payment sizes are unprecedented.
'These are pretty sophisticated companies allocating major capital here," says Craig Garthwaite, a professor and director of the program on healthcare at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, of the latest deals. 'It's demonstrating the validity of the science."
It's all happening while Big Pharma is doing its best to show the Trump administration that it can adapt to the president's agenda, as the industry seeks to head off threatened tariffs and drug price limits. Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers, and others have all announced tens of billions of dollars in planned U.S. investments in manufacturing and research facilities this year.
The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
Washington has been increasingly anxious about the rapid development of China's biotech ecosystem. The Biosecure Act, which hasn't passed Congress, targets complex drug manufacturing in China, while a recent report commissioned by Congress called on the U.S. to take 'swift action" to compete with the Chinese biotech sector.
Amid those stalled efforts, the pace of Chinese biotech innovation is picking up. Until recently, the U.S. drug industry had largely seen Chinese biotechs as a source for cheaper 'me too" assets, which echo but don't duplicate existing medicines. Now, with the latest cancer drug deals, Chinese companies are innovating a new class of drugs that every Big Pharma firm seems to think it needs to get in on.
The Summit drug that got investors, analysts, and companies excited last year is known as a PD-1/VEGF bispecific antibody, which combines two proven cancer-fighting tools. Daina Graybosch, an analyst at Leerink Partners, says that companies in the U.S. and Europe have been experimenting with similar combinations, but never tested them in humans.
That's because early-stage human tests are cheaper and easier to run in China than the U.S. All but the largest U.S. biotechs generally develop just one or two experimental medicines at a time, while Chinese biotechs of a similar size 'could have a dozen" different drugs in trials, according to Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Li Watsek.
The combination cancer drugs ultimately weren't exciting enough for the U.S. biotechs to prioritize. But Chinese companies moved forward with different variations. When Summit and its Chinese partner got promising results on an antibody that combined PD-1 and VEGF, there were multiple other Chinese biotechs with their own PD-1/VEGF combinations ready to go.None of this is great news for the U.S. biotech sector, which has been battered in recent years by declining share prices, cash shortfalls, and other challenges.
Over the past 12 months, the SPDR S&P Biotech exchange-traded fund is down 11.5%, versus a gain of 11.7% for the S&P 500.
Watsek says that part of the problem for investors is that it's hard to know what Chinese biotechs are actually working on. 'Right now it's a little bit of a black box, because a lot of these Chinese companies, they may have assets, but it's impossible to track," she says. 'There could be a dozen molecules that are in development that you may not have even heard of."
Over the long term, the worries get potentially more complex.
'At some point, it's going to get terminal velocity, and we're going to have a very dangerous competitor next to us," says Joseph Grogan, a senior policy official during the first Trump administration who is now a nonresident senior scholar at the USC Schaeffer Institute. 'If the Chinese establish the flywheel of the ecosystem that we built—of private-sector companies, research and development, government support, and strong but prudent regulatory foundation—then we're cooked."
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [e-mail]