When Zhao Hong, chief doctor of China’s leading cancer hospital at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, told his fellow delegates at a Communist Party meeting in March that a little-known Guangzhou biotech firm’s cancer drug had beaten the world’s bestselling medicine, investors took notice.
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“As a long-serving front-line doctor, my most profound feeling is that China is at the best time of its biopharmaceutical sector’s development,” he told state media on the sidelines of the annual Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. “In the past year, besides having the world’s second biggest number of novel drugs under development, China has also witnessed a domestic novel drug outclassing the planet’s number one cancer drug.”
Indeed, some Western media outlets suggested the success of start-up Akeso’s cancer drug ivonescimab was a “DeepSeek moment” for China’s drug industry – similar in impact to the artificial intelligence start-up’s launch earlier this year of high-performing models developed at a much lower cost than global peers.
But was the comparison apt? While Chinese drug-development companies have made strides, analysts and experts question whether they can continue to churn out successes on the level of ivonescimab, let alone deliver truly novel breakthroughs – especially in a complex and highly regulated sector that may not be fertile ground for the kind of step-change advances DeepSeek delivered.
Akeso announced in May last year that a late-stage clinical trial showed that ivonescimab could delay non-small-cell lung cancer progression for five months longer than US giant Merck’s Keytruda, which is used to treat a wide variety of cancers and raked in US$29.5 billion in sales in 2024.
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The subsequent media attention sent Akeso’s stock shooting up by 150 per cent amid a wider boom driven by an unprecedented volume of licensing deals, which meant that multinational peers were recognising China’s prowess in drug development.
