By Deena Beasley
SAN DIEGO, June 22 (Reuters) - China, which now conducts more clinical drug trials than the U.S., still lags in several key areas of biotechnology innovation, according to a recent survey of senior U.S. leaders in industry and academia.
The poll, conducted by Cure Innovation Index, found that China is seen as the clear leader in two out of six sectors: clinical development and supply chain.
It found that the U.S. leads in technology transfer, capital and commercialization and talent.
The two countries were viewed as tied in the domain of scientific discovery.
"The U.S. is still leading, but confidence is eroding. Most said they see China as an existential threat," said Seema Kumar, CEO at Cure, which is an affiliate of investment firm Deerfield Management.
The survey findings were presented in San Diego on Monday at the annual meeting of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization.
In recent years, multinational pharmaceutical companies have augmented their pipelines with candidates developed in China, where costs are low, regulation is streamlined and some say government subsidies offer an unfair advantage.
By 2024, the U.S. share of early drug development programs had dropped to around 37% from 48% in 2015, while China's share of the global total rose to over 32% from 8%, according to a study conducted by Georgetown University.
Drugmakers are licensing molecules from China for potential new medicines at an accelerating pace, betting they can turn upfront payments of as little as $80 million into multibillion-dollar treatments.
The trends have alarmed the U.S. government. The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology in a December report warned that "China has systematically built a vertically integrated biotechnology ecosystem that is now in prime position to challenge U.S. leadership."
The Biosecure Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump late last year, restricts federal agencies' business dealings with non-U.S. biotechnology companies.
"China has speed, scale, manufacturing, development, execution, and the U.S. is better at scientific quality, talent, some work on the tech transfer, and most important of all, it has the access to the world's most valuable healthcare market," Kumar said. "Commercialization is America's superpower. ... The buyer is in the U.S."
The U.S. accounted for 53% of the global pharmaceutical market in 2025, up from 49% in 2021, according to Iqvia, which said Europe's share was steady at 24% and the Asia-Pacific region's dipped to 11% from 13%.
Kumar said the Cure survey's other major finding is that rather than competition from China, respondents rated the growing threat of U.S. research funding cuts as the bigger concern.
"The U.S. has all of the right ingredients, but the way we have been funding probably needs to change," Kumar said. She suggested that more needs to be done to secure financing at the National Institutes of Health and to modernize the nation's clinical development infrastructure, which has not been addressed since the nearly 50-year-old Bayh-Dole Act.
(Reporting By Deena Beasley; Editing by Mark Porter)
