China rises as a biotech powerhouse, developing drugs to treat the world

Biotech once looked to China for cheap labor. It may soon find mounting competition instead.

Thanks to bountiful investments and loosening regulations, China has become a nascent biotech powerhouse that investors and entrepreneurs say could one day rival the industry’s Western incumbents. Fueled by a sudden influx of foreign-trained talent, a new generation of Chinese startups is racing to treat the world with medicines invented at home.

China’s rapid rise came into relief earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, often called the Super Bowl for biotech stocks because from a complicated new approach to cancer immunotherapy.