'It's a wake-up call': US biotechs discuss why we've fallen behind China

Noelle Harff, The San Diego Union-Tribune on Feb 25, 2026

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Perched on the cliffs of Torrey Pines in San Diego, investors, CEOs, and scientists this week debated whether U.S. biotechs are losing ground to China. Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Chinese companies were busy inking deals.

“There’s never been a question of whether China will be the leader in biotech. It will absolutely be the leader. The question was when,” said Srini Akkaraju, managing partner of Palo Alto’s Samsara BioCapital, speaking on Tuesday at the Biocom San Diego Global Partnering and Investors Conference. “The answer is it’s a hell of a lot sooner than it should have been.”

Historically, U.S. biotechs and pharmaceutical companies have worked with Chinese firms to run cheap and fast research before expensive, high-stakes human studies at home. Over the years, China has become better at manufacturing and research, and instead of copycat products, real innovation is coming out of the East, experts say.

Now, Americans are starting to notice.

In the first few months of 2026, Chinese pharmaceutical licensing deals hit record highs. Key deals include AstraZeneca’s $18.5 billion pact with CSPC Pharmaceutical for obesity drugs, AbbVie’s $5.6 billion deal with RemeGen for tumor treatment and Pfizer’s $495 million agreement with Sciwind Biosciences.

“China’s like a hungry bear and pharma companies have a chest full of honey,” said Ken Song, CEO of San Diego-based Candid Therapeutics. “We’ve been eating all of this honey for years and years, and now it’s like we’ve taken a nap.”

The biotech investment boom began around 2012. “There was a culture change,” said Mathai Mammen, CEO of Parabilis Medicines in Cambridge, Mass. “The round sizes went up, and the desire to be very efficient went down. Now there is a resurgence of people paying attention to how you’re spending your dollars.”

Venture capital spending in San Diego dropped almost 90% since 2021.

“The last three, four years have been really hard,” he said.

But it wasn’t just imprudence — it was also complacency. When Mammen recently went to China, he was surprised by the pace of change. “It’s a bit of a wake-up call. Like, OK, wow, yeah, we need to do something with a similar sense of urgency.”

In China there is a phenomenon called 9-6-6. Workers are on the job from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week. “Some people are asking for summer Fridays off in the U.S.,” said Nancy Thornberry, founding CEO of New York’s Kallyope, moderating the Innovation & Productivity in China panel. “How do we handle this cultural issue and get that sense of urgency back into pharma and biotech in the U.S.?”

Judith Li, partner at Lilly Asia Ventures, hesitated a moment before speaking. “There is this one metric that is extremely unpopular for me to say,” she said. “Dollar cost per patient is a metric that we should probably reinject.”

Cost per patient is the total expense a company incurs to treat a single patient with a given therapy. If the cost of the drug is too expensive for the market to bear, the drug shouldn’t be pursued despite its clinical efficacy, she said.

For that reason, Carole Nuechterlein, head of Roche Ventures, favors classic small-molecule drugs in the clinic over more expensive gene therapy approaches that many hospitals can’t afford.

On the other side of the argument, some investors say America’s edge is in innovation. Coming up with novel biology is “certainly what the U.S. ecosystem is better at. … I don’t think you see a lot of biology happening in places like China,” said Paul Biondi, managing partner at Cambridge-based Flagship Pioneering, which invests in biotech and life sciences.

The investors went back and forth on stage, discussing where the U.S. could pull ahead, until a scientist who didn’t identify herself stood up in the crowd.

“Hi. Really great panel. You’ve spoken a lot about ways to think about China, but it all comes down to an us-versus-them mentality,” she said. “I didn’t hear a lot about true collaboration across the ocean. I’m curious why?”

Each of the investors commented on how they do, or look forward to, working with Chinese firms.

“In the next five years, we’ll see a major Chinese company in the top 25 pharma companies, and you can go pitch them your U.S.-based innovation,” said Biondi.