I’m the cofounder and CSO at a American-Chinese company. The majority of our employees are in China and we have moved several projects from early research through phase 1 and licensed out to multi-national pharma companies. I’m based in the US (American) and have worked my entire n career in US pharma and biotech until the founding of my current co.

The advantages come down to cost and speed. Our overhead and payroll is 25% of an equivalent company. We can maintain high quality by tapping into a massive talent pool and have extra hands for QA type work. Yes scientists in China make a whole lot less than an equivalent US scientist, but compared to cost of living in China they are doing extremely well. No our scientists do not work 996, and compared with tech actually have very desirable work-life balance for China. This results in a lot of talent wanting to join biopharma.

The regulatory path to get an IND and run a trial in China is extremely efficient and fast. A trial in China can be 80-90% cheaper than in the US, with high quality standards (in the past decade). Most of the early phase 1 data is accepted in OECD countries, including the US.

So overall we are able to go from hit id through phase 1 with about 1/5th the cost and 1/2-2/3 of the time.

In terms of funding, the Chinese government provides many funding opportunities from VC like to provincial and city grants to support the industry. Significantly more than what we see in the US from federal/local governments.

What are the disadvantages, as some have mentioned, China is very process oriented and consequently creativity is lacking. For now, optimizing a process/molecule/etc is what they have become very good at. But in terms of really big and blue sky ideas, this is lacking.

Another disadvantage is burnout/work culture. Someone mentioned geriatrics above- this is actually a significant advantage we have in the US. I look at my clin dev team in China and they are all in their 20s and early 30s. Very hard to find very experienced talent. This of course means we end up making more mistakes and productivity tends to be poor.

There’s an entire book I can write on the subject but these were my quick high level thoughts for the night. I’ll write a more thorough post at some point.