China is now setting the pace in life sciences R&D, conducting more clinical trials than the U.S. and licensing new discoveries to American companies. China has become a linchpin in global drug development, the result of a decade-long national strategy to develop a biopharmaceutical industry. China has surpassed the U.S. in drug clinical trials, per a report from GlobalData, marking a turning point in the global race to dominate the life sciences. An independent, bipartisan commission told Congress last month that China is beating the U.S. in advanced biotech and that policymakers need to pour significant resources into the sector over the next five years to keep up. Some experts say the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health and university-based biomedical research risk putting the U.S. further behind when it should be supporting work on drugs targeting cancer and other conditions and outbreaks like the avian flu. “China is not the [biotech] superpower that has overtaken the U.S., but we certainly have to be very careful that they don’t become the superpower,” said entrepreneur Cyriac Roeding, who’s been tracking Chinese influence in the industry for nearly a decade. In 2024, China listed more than 7,100 clinical trials in the World Health Organization’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. The U.S. listed about 6,000 trials.

Full report: China’s biotechnology companies are conducting more clinical trials than American ones.