Two reports have shown how the global market for pharma development is changing, as China becomes an increasingly important contributor to pharmaceutical development.
International approvals of China-developed drugs have ramped up markedly since 2015, a recent study reveals: in the US, early approvals were sparce and dominated by generic drugs, whereas new drug applications shot up to 570 between 2016 and 2020 and to 567 between 2021 and 2025, it found. (eClinicalMedicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104121). Recent years have seen a rapid increase in innovative medicines, including small-molecule drugs and biologics from China entering major international markets, the research said.
For the last five years, it has been evident that China has been moving more into global health, says Richard Sullivan, a professor of global health at King’s College London. ‘China is now a superpower in this area of pharmaceuticals, vying for the top spot with the US.’
The researchers report that by early 2025, China had over 7,000 active drug development projects, second only to the US and accounting for nearly 29.5% of the global pipeline.
Sullivan carried out the investigation with colleagues at Wuhan University and Beijing University in China. It identified a shift after 2015 of US approvals towards cancer-killing and immunomodulating agents, as well as cardiovascular and nervous system drugs. Biologic drug approvals first appeared in 2022 and clustered after 2023 in the US. Approvals by the European Medicines Agency remained fewer than in the US but were concentrated in oncology, immunology biologics, biosimilars and advanced therapies, the researchers report.
Overall, from 1990 to 2025, the therapeutic category of antineoplastic and immunomodulating agents (oncology) accounted for 19.3% of the China-developed medicines approved in the US, with cardiovascular drugs marginally behind at 18.8%, nervous system agents at 18.1% and alimentary tract and metabolism treatments at 10% and anti-infectives for systemic use at 10.8%. ‘Oncology remains absolutely dominant,’ says Sullivan about China-developed drugs. ‘But we were surprised to see increases heavily driven by biologics and other domains such as cardiovascular drugs and anti-infectives.’
The findings highlighted rising regulatory maturity and global development capacity amongst Chinese pharmaceutical firms. ‘There’s been a Chinese alignment with the sort of global governance around clinical trials that the West had in place for a long time,’ Sullivan says. Meanwhile, Chinese companies are reaching into new areas and collaborating with Western companies. ‘It was a surprise just how diverse the biotech market is in China,’ says Sullivan.
Separate research published by the US National Pharmaceuticals Council (NPC) in the journal Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science also details how the nature of the global pharma market has changed in the last two decades. NPC used Citeline’s PharmaProjects database to identify where small-molecule and biologic drugs launched first and the home countries of the companies that developed them from 2004 through to 2024.
It found that between 2004 and 2024, the share of drugs launched first in the US dropped from 45.9 to 37.8%, and the share of drugs launched first in Europe fell from 26.7 to 8.5% - while this share in China grew from 3.3% to 28.7%. The study found that the share of first-launched therapeutics developed by US-headquartered companies and by companies based in Europe declined while the share developed by companies based in China increased.
The paper said there are likely many reasons for the growth of first launches and development in China. Some aspects of the health system’s infrastructure likely make clinical trials easier to manage, while national funding to support research has also grown, making pharmaceutical development less risky, along with an increasingly favourable regulatory environment.
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