When the US biotech innovator Moderna leveraged the same messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology that powered COVID-19 vaccines to treat melanoma, the clinical trial results marked a dramatic breakthrough. The personalized vaccine instructs the body to produce harmless fragments of a tumor’s unique mutations, training the patient’s immune system to precisely target and destroy the cancer cells.
Scientists are now developing similar mRNA vaccines to overcome the uniquely resistant environments of advanced prostate cancer, and other deadly malignancies.
China’s position within the biotechnology value chain has changed. Nearly half of the therapeutic mRNA cancer vaccines in the global research pipeline come from Chinese companies, with applications for pioneering treatments for diseases beyond oncology.
The old maxim of China as a copycat does not apply here. Chinese biotech firms are increasingly innovating, pioneering discovery and early clinical development. So far, the partnerships look mutually beneficial, accelerating advances and profiting both sides. But they are also fueling the rise of a potentially formidable competitor in a domain historically dominated by US and European companies.
The issue could come up at this week’s summit between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping. Under the 2025 Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security Act, the US is required to screen deals made with certain countries that involve sensitive technology, from AI to semiconductors. Should pharmaceuticals be included? The administration needs to finalize a decision by March 2027.Chinese drugmakers completed 157 outbound licensing deals in 2025 with an aggregate potential value of approximately $135.7 billion, up from 94 deals worth $51.9 billion in 2024. Chinese regulatory data put those transactions at roughly 49% of the global total, a remarkable change for an industry once defined internationally by generics, contract manufacturing, and lower-cost production
For much of the past two decades, manufacturing prowess fueled China’s rise in biotechnology. Western pharmaceutical players remained dominant in high-value discovery and commercialization, while China became indispensable to important portions of the physical supply chain.
This paradigm now looks outdated. Partnerships are entangling both and blurring the lines of the old maxim, “the West invents and commercializes while China manufactures.” Since 2023, American giant Moderna partnered with Chinese biotech CARsgen targeting advanced gastric and pancreatic tumors. In May 2026, Pfizer agreed to a collaboration with China’s Innovent Biologics valued at up to $10.5 billion covering 12 oncology programs. Eight originated at Innovent, while four came from Pfizer. Innovent will conduct early clinical development for parts of the portfolio, while Pfizer brings global clinical development, regulatory, and commercialization capabilities. Several programs will be jointly developed and commercialized in the US and Europe.
AstraZeneca is pursuing a similar model. In January 2026, the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company entered into a collaboration with China’s CSPC Pharmaceutical Group covering eight obesity and type-2 diabetes diseases. CSPC is responsible for advancing the programs through Phase I, after which AstraZeneca will be responsible for development and commercialization outside of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. The agreement included $1.2 billion upfront, and as much as $13.8 billion in additional milestone payments.
In these deals, credit for discoveries is often shared or ambiguous, shaped by whichever partner brought the initial target, the modified molecule, or the early data. These partnerships allow China to become an increasingly important discovery player within global pharma and biotech. But it does not assure Chinese supremacy.
Biotech power operates across at least three stages: manufacturing, discovery, and translation. China became formidable in the first. It is rapidly strengthening its position in the second. The US and Europe continue to possess extraordinary advantages in the third: deep capital markets, large pharmaceutical companies, multinational clinical development networks, sophisticated regulatory institutions, advanced manufacturing, and access to wealthy global markets.
Translation is not a trivial role. It is itself a source of structural power. An innovation system capable of absorbing discoveries, regardless of where they originate, can remain dominant even when it does not originate every discovery itself. The open question is whether China will eventually internalize more of the capabilities required to move a molecule from laboratory discovery to worldwide commercialization.
For now, the boom in Chinese licensing deals demonstrates the continuing strength of American and European pharmaceutical and biotech giants. A promising molecule discovered in China often becomes globally valuable because a multinational pharmaceutical company can finance late-stage trials, navigate approvals from the US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency, manufacture at scale, and commercialize it in the US, Europe, and other major markets.
But the boom in licensing deals indicates that the competitive landscape, in the long-term, may be changing in favor of China. Chinese biotech is creating assets valuable enough that some of the largest Western pharmaceutical companies are competing for access to them.
Control over discovery generates licensing revenue and patents. Perhaps most importantly, discovery trains scientists and drug developers, creates proprietary datasets and platform capabilities, and attracts capital and talent. Those capabilities compound over time.
A country that supplies an ingredient can potentially be replaced by another manufacturer, even if it is sometimes at considerable cost and delay. A company that owns a uniquely effective molecule or therapeutic platform cannot necessarily be substituted in the same way.
Licensing Chinese assets does not automatically translate into Chinese biotech dominance. The value of that asset remains almost entirely speculative when most of these licensing deals are signed. Not every Chinese drug candidate will succeed. Drug development remains extraordinarily risky, and the industry-wide attrition rate from early clinical development to approval is steep.
But the direction matters. China is already moving into a higher-value position within global biotech. For the US and Europe, the policy challenge is to track how many Chinese innovations survive the drug discovery pipeline to market, while preserving the capabilities that make the transatlantic biotech industry the most attractive and effective place in the world to finance, develop, test, regulate, manufacture, and commercialize breakthrough therapeutics.
In the high-stakes race to cure cancer and other diseases, the line between Western supremacy and Chinese innovation could be a bridge to cure intractable diseases like cancer — and a new source of tension.
Elly Rostoum is a Senior Resident Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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