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Guest Essay

By Jacob Dreyer

Mr. Dreyer is an American editor and writer who lives in Shanghai.

Just outside Shanghai, in the city of Wuxi, China is building its future of medicine — a booming biotechnology hub of factories and laboratories where global pharmaceutical companies can develop and manufacture drugs faster and cheaper than anywhere else.

Amid the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, I figured manufacturing hubs like this one would be racked with anxiety. But when I visited Wuxi in April, government officials insisted that its research hub was flourishing. They were proud to tell me about their superstar labs and companies that are continuing to thrive. The fact that Chinese biotechnology stocks have surged over 60 percent since January seems to bolster this claim. The city’s researchers certainly seemed positioned to be busy for decades.

In its quest to dethrone American dominance in biotech, China isn’t necessarily trying to beat America at its own game. While the U.S. biotech industry is known for incubating cutting-edge treatments and cures, China’s approach to innovation is mostly focused on speeding up manufacturing and slashing costs. The idea isn’t to advance, say, breakthroughs in the gene-editing technology CRISPR; it’s to make the country’s research, development, testing and production of drugs and medical products hyperefficient and cheaper.

As a result, China’s biotech sector can deliver drugs and other medical products to customers at much cheaper prices, including inexpensive generics. These may not be world-changing cures, but they are treatments that millions of people around the world rely on every day. And as China’s reach expands, the world will soon have to reckon with a new leader in biotech and decide how it wants to respond.

One such company that embodies the Chinese approach to biotech is Wuxi AppTec. It’s a one-stop shop for pharmaceutical research and development, streamlining everything from early-stage drug discovery to young scientist recruitment and medication production. The company, whose clients have included Chinese companies like Innovent and Jiangsu Hengrui, as well as American and European drugmakers like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, was involved in, by one estimate, a quarter of the drugs used in the United States, including blockbuster cancer drugs.

Though the Chinese government bargains hard with both foreign and domestic pharmaceutical companies to provide products at the right price in exchange for market access, the low prices that Chinese consumers pay are ultimately the result of Chinese biotech companies’ ability to test and manufacture drugs much faster than their American counterparts. So far, American biotech giants don’t seem to mind the competition, since their own use of companies like Wuxi AppTec allows them to dedicate more of their money to breakthrough research.

That may soon change. Armed with aggressive government support, an expanding cohort of scientists, a large patient pool, a streamlined health care system and collaborations with foreign businesses (including American ones), the Chinese biotech sector may soon catch up to America’s — and U.S. leaders know it. In April a bipartisan congressional commission recommended investing at least $15 billion in biotech over the next five years to compete with China. Federal legislation is being considered, such as the Biosecure Act, which passed the House last year and would prohibit federal agencies and recipients of federal funds from contracting with Chinese biotech contractors like Wuxi AppTec.

The dire state of the American research landscape may render such policies moot. U.S. federal funding for medical research is significantly higher than China’s, thanks in great part to funding provided by the National Institutes of Health and........

© The New York Times