The world pharmaceutical industry has been sunk in its “Deepseek moment”: China is devouring it

This summer we estee that, for the first time in history, China beat Europe as a new medication developer. It was not a stroke of luck: the pharmacist is one of the most complex sectors in the world and China has been determined to compete in it at the highest level.

A decision that is paying off.

So much that, today, the question is not whether China will stand up to the US. The question is whether the western pharmaceutical industry is facing its own “moment Deepseek“: The appearance of a more agile competitor, cheaper and (at least on paper) equally good.

A small panoramic. Historically, Europe was always the great world pharmaceutical superpower. However, in the decade that goes between 1995 and 2005, the situation changed: the US made a very strong biomedical commitment and managed to advance the old continent. That has not changed in the last 20 years.

In fact, according to the latest edition of the ‘The Pharmaceutical Industry in figures‘(The 2023), they say that the 90 new molecules, 28 were American compared to 17 of European origin.

The surprise was another: that China had managed to put 25 on the table.

And although that, alone it changes (almost) everything; There was something else. In autumn, summit therapeutics announced that its drug He had surpassed Keytruda, a well -known Merck immunotherapy against lung cancer that moves more than 30,000 million a year.

To get an idea of ​​the bombing: only that news catapulted Summit to the top positions of world biotechnology (with a stock market capitalization of billions) even though … it has no approved drug.

As David Wainer explained“China’s rise in biotechnology has been managing for years, but now it is impossible to ignore it.” In 2020, less than 5% of the large pharmaceutical transactions worth 50 million dollars or more were related to China. “In 2024, that figure had increased to almost 30%,” According to the journalist.

Why does this happen? Although everything has some speculative air, experts agree that There are some key factors behind Of all this:

• Lower costs: both for the ease of access to highly qualified labor and low cost and access to thousands of people for optimized clinical trials.
• Minimum bureaucracy and less security obstacles that accelerate the market arrival process.

And what consequences can it generate? That may be what most matches all this with What happened to Deep Seek: That the uncertainty about what may be doing in China, makes investors think much more if it is profitable to finance new projects.

What is the point of spending hundreds of millions on something they can do in China for a dozen (And what, in fact, are surely doing even if we don’t know it)?

And Europe? While innovation seems to go to China, Europe is still changed. Successes like Novo Nordisk and Ozempiceven invisible that we are losing a career that we should not lose (it is more, that we have been losing it for years).

Josep Borrellformer high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has passed years saying that “When the pandemic arrived we realized that in Europe there was not a single gram of paracetamol.” That was something that did not worry anyone because Europe had always thought it was a problem of productive outsourcing.

Now we are discovering that, along the way, we were outsourcing much more than that.

Image | Mika Baumeister | Deepseek + Philipp Katzenberger

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